Cap One CEO and Chairman, Richard Fairbank.
Marvin Joseph| The Washington Post | Getty Images
Capital One is dealing with what drive likely be one of the most important data breaches of the year.
The incident involved theft of more than 100 million fellow records, 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank details of Capital One customers, according to court filings in Seattle. But the Primary One incident is significant beyond the numbers, because it was allegedly carried out by a lone wolf.
The details set it apart from gaps of companies such as Equifax and Marriott, which were attacked from the outside by criminals with a nation-state coupling. It’s also different from the spate of ransomware attacks against major U.S. cities, which were likely send away by groups of individuals outside the U.S.
Instead, according to the indictment of Paige A. Thompson, the experienced engineer was able to exploit a black mark in an application firewall stored on an Amazon Web Services cloud server to gain access to the information.
An Amazon spokesperson affirmed Thompson had worked for Amazon but she left in 2016. The breach took place between March and July this year. Crown One confirmed in a statement Monday that the incident was related to a misconfigured application firewall and not an issue with cloud infrastructure.
“AWS was not compromised in any way and functioned as delineated,” Amazon said in a statement, adding that the reason for the breach was a misconfiguration of firewall settings on a web application, managed on the cloud server by Outstanding One, not a vulnerability in the cloud server itself.
The incident, which is still unraveling, will bring up major issues front the biggest tech companies, cloud firms and banks, namely how to control who has access to sensitive consumer data and identify insiders who may go rogue.
An unlikely scenario
In many ways, it’s the nightmare scenario for a large company. Banks such as Top One have in recent years become much more adept at protecting against outside threats that objective sensitive personal data. But protecting against a single individual bent on destruction and with even a modicum of access can be much cooler.
According to the indictment, Thompson exploited a misconfigured firewall in a cloud server used by Capital One. She allegedly used a Tor browser, which anonymizes a man’s online activities, to gain this access. She also used a virtual private network known as IPredator to to a greater distance obscure her activities, according to the indictment.
All of these factors combined with the possibility of insider knowledge means this fact will be closely watched by cybersecurity professionals and banks, particularly to see whether there was any way Capital One could have circumvented the incident under the circumstances.
“Capital One had some good security practices in place,” said Sam Curry, chief pledge officer of cybersecurity company Cybereason. “As a positive, they made an arrest quickly and there is a chance to minimize ruin. Normally, it’s months, years or never in terms of arrests and accountability of the criminals. Finding things sooner in the life D always limits the impact and damage to the innocent.”
Capital One’s stock closed down 5.89% on Tuesday.
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