A software engineer in Seattle hacked into a server holding customer information for Capital One and obtained the personal data of over 100 million people, federal prosecutors said on Monday, in one of the largest thefts of data from a bank.
The suspect, Paige Thompson, 33, left a trail online for investigators to follow as she boasted about the hacking, according to court documents in Seattle, where she was arrested and charged with one count of computer fraud and abuse.
Ms. Thompson, who formerly worked for Amazon Web Services, which hosted the Capital One database that was breached, was not shy about her work as a hacker. She is listed as the organizer of a group on Meetup, a social network, called Seattle Warez Kiddies, described as a gathering for “anybody with an appreciation for distributed systems, programming, hacking, cracking.”
The reason she got caught?
“I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest,” Ms. Thompson wrote in a Slack post, according to prosecutors, “dropping capital ones dox and admitting it.”
People whose data was breached are probably not in any danger:
“Based on our analysis to date,” the bank said in a statement, “we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual.”
The hacker hinted at mental problems and depression over the death of her cat.
