Personal Data of 6 Million Canadians Compromised After Major Bank Hack

Published July 30, 2019 at 3:49 am

banks

There has been another breach in a major bank’s data, leading to millions of Canadian’s private information being compromised.

On Monday (July 29) Capital One Financial Corp announced that over 100 million individuals had their personal information collected by a hacker. Around six million Canadians were affected by this breach as well.

The suspect in this incident, Paige Thompson, 33, was a former software engineer in a Seattle based company. 

According to Capital One, Thompson did not gain access to credit card account numbers, but about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers instead. Other personal information she collected included phone numbers and credit scores.

Capital One estimates 1 million social insurance numbers of Canadian customers were also compromised, along with many more personal bank numbers and credit scores. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, Thompson was able to gain access to the data through a misconfigured web application firewall.

The hacking took place between March 12 and July 17. Thompson later posted information from her hack on the open-source sharing website GitHub, where it was seen by a user who reported it to Capital One.

The hack was then confirmed on July 19 by Captial One.

Law enforcement officers tracked Thompson down using information from her post on GitHub, as it contained her full name in the website’s data.

Thompson made a court appearance on Monday at the U.S. District Court in Seattle.

The incident will cost between $100-million and $150-million this year for Capital One, according to a statement from the company.

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