A federal jury on Friday convicted a former Seattle tech worker of several charges related to a massive hack of Capital One bank and other companies in 2019.
Paige Thompson, 36, a former Amazon software engineer who used the online handle “erratic,” obtained the personal information of more than 100 million people — a data breach that prompted Capital One to reach a tentative $190 million settlement with affected customers. The Treasury Department also fined the company $80 million for failing to protect the data.
Federal prosecutors said she didn’t just steal the data, but also planted software on servers she unlawfully accessed to steal computing power to mine cryptocurrency. In interviews with The Associated Press following her arrest, friends and associates described Thompson as a skilled programmer and software architect whose career and behavior — oversharing in chat groups, frequent profanity, expressions of gender-identity distress and emotional ups and downs — mirrored her online handle.