Data Breach at Capital One Exposes Personal Data of 106 Million People

A data breach to Capital One servers in March 2019 exposed the personal information of nearly 106 million of the bank’s customers and applicants. In March 2019, Paige Thompson, a hacker and a former employee of Amazon’s cloud-computing division, gained access to personal information related to credit card applications from 2005 to early 2019 for consumers, applicants, and small businesses.

Just a week after the credit reporting agency Equifax agreed to pay up to $700 million in individual compensation and civil penalties to settle a 2017 security breach that exposed the personal data of 147 million people, Capital One disclosed that it was subject to a massive security breach.

It was reported that the hacker was able to find an opening in Capital One’s systems and exploit a weakness in some misconfigured networks, which security professionals have warned about for years.

Capital One detected the security breach on July 19, 2019. Names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, transaction data, and Social Security numbers linked to bank account numbers are among the personal data exposed by the security breach. According to Capital One, about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers were exposed.

If the Equifax security breach would be any indication, Capital One will be liable for exposing sensitive personal data of millions of people. According to Capital One, the affected individuals are expected to hear from the bank this week.

Johnson Fistel has offices in California, Georgia, and New York. The firm has a successful track record representing both businesses and individuals in a wide variety of complex litigation matters.

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