Paige Thompson, former Amazon software engineer, was sentenced to a limited time jail term and a 5-year probation for causing anxiety among millions of people who were concerned about the private data leak.
Probably, Ms. Thompson, happens to be the first transgender to be found guilty in a digital attack case and will have to face extremely harsh time as she is suffering from mental issues. In a separate hearing scheduled to be held for December 1st, 2022, the court of law will decide on how much Ms. Paige will have to pay as restitution for causing trouble to people with crime.
To those who aren’t aware of what exactly did Paige commit as a crime, here’s a gist. She gained unauthorized access into the IT infrastructure of Capital One that was discovered by the staff on July 19th,2019.
According to the sources from the court, Ms. Paige Thompson stole about one million social insurance numbers; 140,000 social security numbers, and 80K bank account details linked to the social security numbers. Apart from the said details of sensitive information, the individual also stole names, phone numbers, zip codes, addresses, email addresses and DoBs to send that data on the dark web in mid-2020, during the covid lockdown crisis.
Capital One’s staff informed the law enforcement about the fraudulent access that resulted in the leak of info related to 106 million people and causing $250 million worth of damage.
Later investigations revealed Thompson accessed the data from a mis-configured Amazon storage account by using her experience as an Amazon Engineer. She also deployed crypto- mining software on the server resources and linked the earnings direct to her crypto-wallet.
Paige reportedly confessed in court that she indulged in such activities to make easy money and outsmart other people, only to prove her smartness.
