Capital One Gets $80 Million Fine Over Last Year’s Data Breach
Capital One suffered a data breach last year when a software engineer allegedly exploited a vulnerability to access its systems. Approximately 100 million people in the United States and 6 million more in Canada were affected. The data breach compromised 140,000 Social Security numbers, 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.
Now the U.S. Treasury Department has fined Capital One $80 million for careless network security practices that enabled the hack. The Comptroller of the Currency said that Capital One failed “to establish effective risk assessment processes prior to migrating significant information technology operations to the public cloud environment.”
The accused hacker was a former Amazon software engineer, Paige Thompson, who plead innocent to charges related to the breach.
