Paige Thompson
Paige Adele Thompson (alias "erratic") is a computer programmer who became infamous for allegedly hacking into Capital One's records of credit card applications, obtaining more than 100 million records.[1][2]
Background
Paige Adele Thompson (about 40 years old) is a transgender individual, who was born male but claims to be a woman.[3] They were known online by the handle "erratic." Thompson lived in Seattle, WA, and has worked for Amazon as a systems engineer (2015–2016), ATG Stores Inc, ConnectXYZLLC, and Seattle Software Systems.[4]
Thompson frequently posted about his struggles with gender identity, lack of employment, and persistent suicidal thoughts, on the chat platform Slack. Thompson also referred several times to running a botnet involved in cryptojacking, although it is not clear whether this was in fact being done.[1]
Capital One hack
Between March 12 and July 17, 2019, Thompson allegedly gained unauthorized access to data belonging to the Capital One Financial Corporation. Thompson was able to get through a misconfigured web application firewall (WAF) which was supposed to be protecting an s3 bucket containing credit card applications.[2] This is an attack method which has become well-known, and is listed on the OWASP top 10 threats.[5]
After exfiltrating about 100 million applications (totaling over 30 GB of private data), Thompson proceeded to boast about the accomplishment online, and was soon arrested by the FBI, on July 29, 2019.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/capital-one-data-theft-impacts-106m-people/
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 https://heavy.com/news/2019/07/paige-adele-thompson/
- ↑ McLean, Dorothy Cummings (August 2, 2019). Capital One thief is a biological male, not a woman – a ‘trans’. LifeSiteNews. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
- ↑ https://www.scribd.com/document/415542580/cv
- ↑ https://www.owasp.org/images/7/72/OWASP_Top_10-2017_%28en%29.pdf.pdf
