By: Anna Luo
Last Friday, former Amazon employee Paige Thompson was convicted for wire fraud and hacking charges after being accused of stealing information from over 100 million individuals during the massive Capital One breach of 2019.
She was found guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits access to a computer without authorization. This controversial law was recently altered so that ethical hackers could not be convicted in court, a fact that Ms. Thompson’s lawyers capitalized on. According to The New York Times article by Kate Conger, “Her legal team argued that she had used the same tools and methods as ethical hackers who hunt for software vulnerabilities and report them to companies so they can be fixed.”
However, according to the Justice Department, Ms. Thompson was not an ethical hacker because she did not plan to ever alert Capital One of the issues in their system that gave her access to their customers’ data. Additionally, she had not only used her access to Capital One’s servers to mine cryptocurrency but had also bragged to others online about doing so. In a statement, Nicholas W. Brown, the U.S attorney for the Western District of Washington, indicated that Ms. Thompson is “far from being an ethical hacker trying to help companies with their computer security” because “she exploited mistakes to steal valuable data and sought to enrich herself.”
The Seattle jury ultimately convicted Ms. Thompson of five counts of gaining unauthorized access to and damaging a protected computer, as well as wire fraud charges.
Nevertheless, Ms. Thompson is not the only party facing consequences. After a woman who Ms. Thompson confided in reported the breach, Capital One agreed to pay $80 million in 2020 to regulators who claimed the company was not in a position to protect customers’ information. In December, it also agreed to pay $190 million to people whose data had been exposed in the breach.
Ms. Thompson is scheduled to be sentenced on September 15th.
Article Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/technology/paige-thompson-capital-one-hack.html