Paige A. Thompson
Paige A. Thompson has been named as the culprit in hacking into Capital One’s computers and made off with the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Thompson, has been charged with computer fraud and “abuse for an intrusion on the stored data” She allegedly took advantage of a misconfigured firewall to access the bank’s credit card customer data, causing a historic data breach for Capital One -which learned of the intrusion after someone emailed them a link to Thompson’s GitHub page on July 17 with files that had apparently been stolen from the company.
Thompson made off with names, addresses, dates of birth and credit history information, as well as mostly encrypted Social Security numbers, according to the FBI.
According to CNBC, the FBI found Thompson’s account on Meetup, the online app to connect people for activities and events. The FBI found a group organized by “erratic,” which it said was her alias.
Paige A. Thompson already made her first court appearance after authorities seized numerous devices from her home. If she’s convicted, Thompson faces as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
33-year-old Paige Adele Thompson is known by her online hacker alias, Erratic. She is a technology company software engineer who is based in Seattle and has held a number of jobs including a gig at Amazon. According to her resume Thompson attended Bellevue Community College from 2005 to 2006, but dropped out in order to take a job. On her now-defunct website, Thompson wrote that she’s a self-learner but did want to go back to school someday.
On Twitter, Thompson identified herself as a transgender woman. On social media her interests mostly revolved around her work, programming and cats. But according to the DOJ complaint -she appeared to intend to check herself into a psychiatric institution, her intentions were revealed in a series of tweets earlier this month.
