Warren Calls on Capital One to Release Information on Data Breach

Friday, August 09, 2019

GoLocalWorcester News Team

Elizabeth Warren Calls on Capital One to Release Information on Data Breach

United States Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling on Capital One to release information regarding its data breach that affected over 100 million customers.

Warren sent a letter to Capital One Financial Corporation Chairman and Chief Executive Office Richard Fairbank asking the company to take accountability.

Read the Letter Here

"It is critical that individuals or businesses whose data was exposed due to Capital One's security failures receive adequate and timely notifications. The public deserves to know exactly what the company plans to do to ensure that consumers' accounts and application information are protected from the consequences of Capital One's security failures,” said Warren.

Warren asked that Capital One respond by August 19, 2019 and explain how the company database was breached, which security systems failed or were insufficient, what steps the company has taken to fix both the vulnerability and the systems that failed to detect the breach, and what efforts the company will make to rectify the impact of the breach and hold executives accountable.

Capital One Data Breach

In a statement released on Monday, July 29, Capital One revealed there had been unauthorized access to their servers by an "outside individual."

The hacker, identified as Paige Thompson, was a previous employee of Amazon Web Services. According to the FBI, she was able to access Capital One’s data through a web browser's misconfigured firewall.

Thompson gained access to 140,000 Social Security numbers, 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.

An undisclosed number of people also had their personal information such as names, addresses and credit scores obtained by Thompson. In total, 100 million people in the United States and 6 million in Canada were affected by the breach.