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The Technical Side of the Capital One AWS Security Breach
On July 19th, 2019 Capital One got the red flag that every modern company hopes to avoid - their data had been breached. Over 106 million people affected. 140,000 Social Security numbers. 80,000 bank account numbers. 1,000,000 Social Insurance Numbers. Pretty messy right?
Unfortunately, the 19th wasn't when the breach occurred. It turns out that Paige Thompson, aka Erratic, had done the deed between March 22nd and March 23rd 2019. So almost 4 months earlier. In fact, it took an external tip for Capital One to realize something had happened.
Though the former Amazon employee has been arrested and is facing $250k in fines and 5 years in prison...it's left a lot of residual negativity. Why? Because of many of the companies who've suffered data breaches try to brush off the responsibility of hardening their infrastructures and applications to the increased cyber crime.
ANYHOW. You can read more about the case by just asking Google. We won't go into that anymore. We're here to talk about the TECHNICAL side of things.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @06:55PM (3 children)
Is it on the technical side of things that Capital One, a bank flush with your money, used Someone Else's Computer rather than use in-house expertise (supposing they hadn't laid them off already) and equipment?
And when doing so, they did not use Someone Else's Computer for data that was accessible via private VPN ("private cloud") only, but one that was listening on the open internet?
I'm sure some of us have written web services before. As a matter of course, only the web server has a port open for incoming requests, the database server is on the internal network. Capital One on the other hand like bottom barrel talent did the equivalent of setting up the web server to talk to the database server on the open internet, and someone then pulled the data off of the database server.
(Score: 2) by GDX on Saturday August 03 2019, @07:12PM (1 child)
Welcome to the greatness of cloud computing, specifically the one of clueless bosses that dance in the hands of commercial agents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @10:47PM
Gta V cloud computing AD [youtube.com]. LOL Your are fired Internet.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 03 2019, @07:13PM
As AC implies: technically, this is about massive lazy greedy corporations shifting liability and hassle off on their little-guy captive customers who can't do anything about it.
Technically: it's well known _how_ to secure these things, the problem is that, like pollution reduction in the energy industry, it's more expensive to build, maintain, and operate truly secure banking systems than it is to roll with the status quo, particularly in the short term.
There's never enough time to fix it before the breach, but there's always enough time to run around picking up the pieces afterwards. They're viewing it as a risk-benefit problem and they're not entirely wrong. However, they are probably not factoring in the time cost and anxiety and occasional real monetary damages suffered by their customers.
I'll put in a pitch for transparency: transparency of the security architecture, transparency of the actual security performance, otherwise there's no real choice in banking, they all look the same until you wake up with your identity stolen one morning and spend the next 90 days sorting out one mess after another.
🌻🌻 [google.com]