Capital One breach tip of heist, officials say

Accused hacker stole data from many companies, organizations

DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI The software engineer accused of stealing the personal information of more than 100 million people from Capital One also obtained data from more than 30 companies and other organizations, according to U.S. federal prosecutors.

In a court filing Tuesday, prosecutors said they found multiple terabytes of stolen data from other companies, educational institutions and other organizations on seized servers from the bedroom of Paige Thompson, a former employee of Amazon Web Services who was accused of the high-profile data heist.

Thompson was arrested and charged last month in the breach of Capital One’s database, which was hosted on Amazon Web Services computers. According to court documents, Thompson had stolen 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.

At the time, Capital One said it had tens of millions of credit card applications stolen, including one million Canadian social insurance numbers.

Consumers and businesses had submitted the applications to Capital One, the third-largest credit card issuer in the United States, as early as 2005 and as recently as 2019, the company said.

The revelation of additional stolen data was made in a filing in U.S. District Court in Western Washington as part of the prosecutors’ motion to deny bail to Thompson.

The prosecutors said much of the newly discovered stolen data did not contain personal identifying information.

Authorities said they were still working to identify the specific entities from which the data was stolen and they expect to bring additional charges against Thompson.

They did not say if Thompson had obtained the data during her employment at Amazon Web Services.

“Thompson’s crime in this case — major cyber intrusions that resulted in the theft of massive amounts of data from what now appears to be more than 30 victim companies — only exacerbates the harm that Thompson has done, and the threat she would pose if released,” prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors argued against bail in their filing, saying that Thompson had repeatedly threatened to harm herself and others.

They also said that in the course of executing a search of her home, they found an arsenal of weapons, ammunition and explosives in the bedroom of her roommate, who was a felon and was not allowed to possess firearms.