Consequences of the Capital One breach
Jul 30, 2019
A suspect has been arrested but trial is out on the banking group.
How do you compensate someone for these sorts of privacy violations? Is the frequency of these attacks finally too high?
Unimpressed, one man has filed a class-action lawsuit against the bank for failing to protect its customers' information while another New York attorney general announced that they will be conducting a probe against the company to obtain relief for the victims. As an escape from the financial sector, cash plays an empowering role when an individual challenges a powerful company.
“Basically, I can do a better job of maintaining my security than clearly Equifax or Capital One can [...] You hear about these data breaches over and over and over again [...] It’s a fact of life.”
According to a complaint filed in the District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, Thompson posted information from her hack, which occurred between March 12 and July 17, on coding platform GitHub. Another user saw the post and notified Capital One of the breach.
Law enforcement officials were able to track Thompson down as the page she posted on contained her full name as part of its digital address, the complaint said. Capital One said it identified the hack on July 19.
The lawsuit seeking class-action status was filed in the federal court in Washington, D.C. by Kevin Zosiak, a Stamford, Connecticut resident who said he is a Capital One credit card customer whose personal information was compromised. It is likely to herald many similar lawsuits over the breach.
Capital One said on Monday that the breach affected about 100 million people in the United States and 6 million in Canada, and compromised about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.