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The motivation of the malicious actor who stole data of more than 100 million people was driven by emotional distress and did not follow traditional hacker patterns.
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Software engineer Paige Thompson was arrested in late July for an unprecedented hack into a cloud server containing the personal data of over 100 million people who had filed credit card applications with leading financial institution Capital One. Thompson, who at the time of her arrest ran a hosting company called Netcrave Communications, had held a series of engineering jobs, including a stint at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015 and 2016, where she presumably gained the skills to exploit a vulnerability in an application firewall on Capital One’s AWS server.

Thompson’s ultimate theft of the 100 million customer records, 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank details of Capital One customers was apparently only one of her many hacks. In a legal filing related to keeping her remanded into custody, federal prosecutors say she hit more than 30 other targets, including companies and educational institutions.

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