Hi and welcome to malicious life in collaboration with cyberism.

On March 22nd, 2019, Page Thompson broke into the database of Capital One Bank. The next day she walked away with social security numbers, bank account numbers and other personal information for over 100 million people. How could one person steal so much information from an institution of this scale?

We, the public, have to trust banks with our most sensitive

personal data. Yet something was obviously wrong with how Capital One protected that data.

Like a babysitter who lost the kids, Capital One breached the public's trust.

Except Capital One's story isn't only about corporate negligence.

Large-scale cybersecurity, particularly in the financial sector, is much more complicated than it appears

at first glance.

Banks are huge targets, fending off hundreds of thousands of threats per day.

When one hacker manages to slip through the cracks,

it tells a small part of a much larger story.

Banks hire people to prevent hacks. Some of them, such as those implicated

in Capital One's hack, have failed miserably. Others have done much better thus far. The approaches they've come up with are, in some

cases, quite extraordinary. failure an improvement. Last year's hack of Capital One provides insight into how not to protect banks

against cyber threats. So what exactly happened? In this case, Capital One used Amazon Web Services,

AWS, to house customer data in the cloud.

The data was protected by a web application firewall, designed to prevent common cyber attacks.

But Capital One's firewall was improperly configured, so it didn't properly validate the commands it received.

This vulnerability allowed Page Thompson to forge a request to the improperly configured servers

and have them exfiltrate all user data.

But only a certain kind of hacker would have known about such a vulnerability, the kind of hacker

with insider knowledge, like Paige Thompson, whose most recent job was as a software engineer for AWS.

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