The woman responsible for Capital One’s data breach, which affected 106 million people faces 25 years in prison for her actions.
ABC News reports, Paige A Thompson is scheduled for arraignment inside a Seattle U.S. district court on Sept 5. Thompson, 33, who is also known as “erratic,” faces charges of wire fraud and computer fraud and abuse.
Capital One said the March 2019 hacking would cost the bank $100 to $150 million in expenses that include notifying customers, credit monitoring, technology that was damaged during the hack and legal expenses.
About six million customers in Canada and 100 million in the United States were affected by the hack. The breach also includes applicants as well as customers.
According to the indictment, Thompson “created scanning software that allowed her to identify customers of a cloud computing company who had misconfigured their firewalls, allowing outside commands to penetrate and access their servers.”
She then used the data she illegally accessed to take over computing power to mine cryptocurrency, which is known as “cryptojacking.” Reportedly there is no evidence to support the belief Thompson sold any of the information she gathered.
Along with Capital One, Thompson’s victims include telecom conglomerate outside the United States and a reported public research university.
Thompson remains in custody.
