Capital One says a hacker got access to the personal information of over 100 million individuals applying for credit.The Associated Press
Capital One Financial Corp shares fell as much as 5.8 per cent on Tuesday as investors worried about its management of customer data after the credit-card issuer said information for 106 million people had been compromised.
“We are a bit surprised that a single individual could penetrate Capital One’s defences and gain access to so many accounts,” stock analyst Dominick Gabriele of Oppenheimer & Co said in a note on Monday after Capital One acknowledged the breach.
The state attorneys general of New York and Connecticut said in separate statements on Tuesday that their offices would begin probing the matter.
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The Capital One data was kept with Amazon.com Inc, which said that its cloud unit was not compromised in any way by a former employee who was charged with computer fraud by federal prosecutors in Seattle.
“The perpetrator gained access through a misconfiguration of the web application and not the underlying cloud-based infrastructure,” said a spokesperson for Amazon.
Amazon shares were down about 0.6 per cent on Tuesday morning.
The suspect, a 33-year-old software engineer and former Amazon Web Services (AWS) employee identified as Paige Thompson, made her initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Seattle on Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.
In a written statement, Capital One chief executive Richard Fairbank said on Monday, “I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”