Massive Capital One Breach Affects 100 Million People in US

This kind of news can be pretty scary for anyone with a credit card, which means almost everyone these days.

Capital One announced on Monday they found that an individual "obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers” on March 22 and 23, 2019.

They discovered the breach on July 19th and conducted an investigation.

Over 100 million people in the U.S. that are in the categories of consumer or small business who applied for the company's credit card from 2005 to 2019 were affected.

That wasn't all though; the hacker also obtained portions of individuals customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, and contact information.

Capital One also says that about 140,000 social security numbers from customers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers of secured credit card customers were also affected by the breach.

The FBI arrested the person responsible, 33-year old Paige Thompson, technology company software engineer.

For some reason, she posted her theft findings on the sharing site GitHub, according to the Department of Justice.

“Capital One said they "believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual."

Read the full story at WIVB. You can also find out more on the breach at Capital One.