Capital One Fined $80 Million for 2019 Data Breach Affecting 106 Million Users

A United States regulator has fined the credit card provider
Capital One Financial Corp with $80 million over last year’s data
breach^[1] that exposed the
personal information of more than 100 million credit card
applicants of Americans.

The fine was imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency (OCC), an independent bureau within the United States
Department of the Treasury that governs the execution of laws
relating to national banks.

According to a press release
published by the OCC on Thursday, Capital One failed to establish
appropriate risk management before migrating its IT operations to a
public cloud-based service, which included appropriate design and
implementation of certain network security controls, adequate data
loss prevention controls, and effective dispositioning of
alerts.
^[2]

The OCC also said that the credit card provider also left numerous
weaknesses in its cloud-based data storage in an internal audit in
2015 as well as failed to patch security vulnerabilities, violating
the “Interagency Guidelines Establishing Information Security
Standards,” that all US banks must comply with.

These unsafe and poor security practices resulted in a massive
data breach last year when a single hacker was able to steal credit
card information of over 106 million Capital One customers.

Besides credit card information, the hacker also managed to steal
approx 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account
numbers linked to US customers, and 1 million Canadian Social
Insurance numbers.
The hacker, identified as former Amazon web services employee
Paige
Thompson^[3] a.k.a erratic, 33, was
arrested following the breach and charged with computer fraud and
abuse, which carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000
fine.

The breach occurred after Thompson allegedly exploited a
misconfigured firewall on Capital One’s Amazon Web Services cloud
server in March and unauthorizedly stole more than 700 folders of
data stored on that server.

In addition to the civil money penalty of 80 million dollars,
the OCC also ordered Capital One Finance to enhance its
cybersecurity security defenses and submit a plan to the OCC within
90 days outlining how it intends to do so.