A former systems engineer has been arrested on charges that she hacked into Capital One’s network and stole sensitive data for about 106 million people, according to an FBI court filing and a statement from the Virginia-based bank.

Paige A. Thompson, 33, of Seattle was an employee of an unnamed cloud-computing company from 2015 to 2016, FBI Special Agent Joel Martini wrote in a criminal complaint filed on Monday.

A GitHub account belonging to her showed that, earlier this year, someone exploited a firewall vulnerability in Capital One’s network that allowed an attacker to execute a series of commands on the bank’s servers.

Capital One has confirmed the intrusion and said it affected about 100 million individuals in the US and 6 million people in Canada. Personal information taken included names, incomes, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Social security numbers for 140,000 people were also obtained, and about 80,000 bank account numbers were accessed. Social Insurance numbers for about 1 million Canadians were also obtained. No credit card numbers or login credentials were compromised.

Adam Levin, Founder of CyberScout and author of “Swiped” says “This is yet another cautionary tale that breaches have become the third certainty in life, behind death and taxes.

Affected consumers should sign up for transaction monitoring alerts where they receive account updates in real time if there is any suspicious or fraud related activity, check their credit reports, and be on high alert for phishing attacks where scammers may impersonate legitimate financial institutions using email, text or phone calls to gain unauthorized access to personal and financial data and login credentials.

“To manage the damage, consumers should look into extensive identity protection that may be offered by financial institutions, insurance companies or the HR department of their employer, in addition to the credit monitoring being offered since millions of Social Security numbers were exposed. “

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– July 30, 2019 @ 18:00 GMT /