A Seattle jury has discovered Paige Thompson, a former Amazon software program engineer accused of stealing knowledge from Capital One in 2019, guilty of wire fraud and 5 counts of unauthorized entry to a protected pc. The Capital One hack was one of many largest safety breaches within the US and compromised the info of 100 million individuals within the nation, together with 6 million individuals in Canada. Thompson was arrested in July that 12 months after a GitHub person noticed her submit on the web site sharing details about stealing knowledge from servers storing Capital One data.
In keeping with the Department of Justice, Thompson used a instrument she constructed herself to scan Amazon Internet Providers for misconfigured accounts. She then allegedly used these accounts to infiltrate Capital One’s servers and obtain over 100 million individuals’s knowledge. The jury has determined that Thompson violated the Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act by doing so, however her legal professionals argued that she used the identical instruments and technique additionally utilized by moral hackers.
The Justice Division not too long ago amended the Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act to guard moral or white hat hackers. So long as researchers are investigating or fixing vulnerabilities in “good religion” and are not utilizing the safety holes they uncover for extortion or different malicious functions, they will now not be charged underneath the regulation.
US authorities, nonetheless, disagreed with the assertion that she was solely attempting to show Capital One’s vulnerabilities. The Justice Division mentioned she planted cryptocurrency mining software program onto the financial institution’s servers and despatched the earnings straight to her digital pockets. She additionally allegedly bragged concerning the hack on on-line boards.
“Removed from being an moral hacker attempting to assist corporations with their pc safety, she exploited errors to steal priceless knowledge and sought to complement herself,” US Lawyer Nick Brown mentioned. Thompson may very well be sentenced with as much as 20 years of jail time for wire fraud and as much as 5 years for every cost of illegally accessing a protected pc. Her sentencing listening to is scheduled for September fifteenth.
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