Seattle tech worker accused of hacking personal data of 100 million

A former software engineer from Seattle has been accused of hacking into Capital One data and stealing the personal information of over 100 million people.

Paige Thompson was arrested Monday at her Beacon Hill home.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says the data Thompson stole included 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.

Roughly a million Canadian Social Insurance Numbers were also hacked.

According to court documents, Thompson bragged about the breach online.

A user then notified Capital One, which alerted the FBI.

Thompson could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Capital One said free credit monitoring and identity protection is being offered to everyone affected.

A man also arrested at Thompson’s house was charged with firearm offenses.

The federal criminal complaint (see below) says data was downloaded from Capital One on April 21, 2019, through a misconfigured firewall.

The complaint says Thompson worked at a cloud computing company in 2015-16, but doesn't name a company. But a resume linked to her says she worked at Amazon Web Services in 2015 and 2016.