At the end of July 2019, an ex-Amazon employee was suspected of hacking Capital One and the news brought about mixed opinions about technology, the personal responsibility of employees, and most of all – security.
The suspect in question is a 33-year old woman who was actually arrested in Seattle over the massive hack at Capital One. Mrs. Paige Thompson served as a software engineer at Amazon and reportedly hacked the Amazon Web Services servers that we in use by the financial services company Capital One. The result – she stole more than 100 million of credit card details and applications. The stolen details actually included social security numbers and bank account data.
Now, according to sources, the software engineer has also been recently charged with not only Capital One, but also 30 other companies. The motivation for almost all of these breaches – to mine cryptocurrencies. The information comes directly from an indictment released by United States District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle.
The indictment goes on to describe the “victims” of Mrs. Thompson’s crimes, as well as indicate the primary way of how these breaches occurred – through the fact that some of the Amazon customers that were using the company’s cloud had specific misconfigurations on their firewalls. So, Mrs. Thompson knowingly exploited those “mishaps” and obtained valuable information and credentials that were not protected properly by the customers.
The reason for some of these hacks was to mine cryptocurrencies, or as the indictment states, to cryptojack. Mrs. Thompson can now go to jail for 25 years if found guilty. She is scheduled to be arraigned on the 5th of September, 2019.
Apart from that, Amazon was actually rumoured to be expanding its cryptocurrency span in early February 2019. However, no further information about the company’s particular next steps are known at this point.