Capital One Financial Corp. has reported a massive data breach impacting 100 million customers, including six million in Canada.
Capital One has announced that the personal information — including names, addresses, phone numbers, credit scores and social security numbers of 100 million individuals in the United States and six million people in Canada were obtained by a hacker. In a statement, Capital One said it became aware of the data breach on July 19.
The U.S. Justice Department said that Paige Thompson, a former Seattle technology company software engineer, was arrested on Monday on a criminal complaint charging computer fraud and abuse for hacking into Capital One Financial Corp.'s stored data. The arrest came after an investigation by the F.B.I. Investigators say Thompson is known online by the alias "Erratic."
The data breach is expected to cost the bank between $100 million and $150 million U.S. in 2019, mainly due to customer notifications, credit monitoring and legal support, Capital One said. The company also said that credit card numbers were not affected by the hack.
According to the 12-page criminal complaint, the hacker allegedly posted information from her hack on the coding platform GitHub. The hacker was able to gain access to the data through a misconfigured web application firewall, the U.S. attorney's office said in a statement.
Headquartered in McLean, Virginia. Capital One is ranked 10th on the list of largest banks in the United States with total assets of $372.538 billion U.S. at the end of 2018.
