Ex-Amazon employee convicted in Capital One hacking case

A former Amazon Web Services employee was convicted From Hacking on Capital One The data of more than 100 million people was stolen nearly three years ago in one of the largest data breaches in the United States.

Big ThompsonHe, who worked as an engineer at the software giant until 2016, was convicted Friday of seven federal crimes, including electronic fraud, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. The other charges, illegally gaining access to a protected computer and causing damage to a protected computer, are punishable by up to five years in prison. A jury statement said Thompson is not guilty of aggravated identity theft and hardware access fraud after 10 hours of deliberation.

The plaintiffs argued that Thompson, who worked under the name “Weird”, created a tool to search for misconfigured accounts on AWS. This allowed her to hack accounts of more than 30 Amazon Customers, including capital oneand prospecting for that data. Prosecutors said Thompson also used her access to some servers to mine cryptocurrencies that went into her private wallet.

“She wanted data, she wanted money, she wanted ostentation,” Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Friedman said of Thompson in closing arguments during the week-long trial.

Capital One agreed in December to pay $190 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the breach, in addition to an earlier agreement to pay $80 million in regulatory fines. The stolen data included about 120,000 Social Security numbers and nearly 77,000 bank account numbers, according to the complaint.

A lawyer representing Thompson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert S. Lasnik set Thompson’s sentencing for September 15.

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