Capital One Agrees to Pay $190 Million Over 2019 Data Breach
Capital One has agreed to pay $190 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that customers filed against the firm after a cyber attack that exposed their personal information. The hacker was actually a Seattle woman, Paige A. Thompson, who had held a day job with Amazon Web Services. She broke into its cloud-computing systems and stole the sensitive information.
The lawsuit alleges that Capital One failed to take “reasonable care” to secure information belonging to its customers. Information dating back as far as 2005 was compromised. Customer data accessed by the hacker includes full names, physical addresses with full ZIP and postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and self-reported income. This is information that is normally required for credit card applications.
The settlement will cover 98 million Americans. Capital One has set aside funds for the settlement and is investing in its cybersecurity program under new leadership, Seattle Times reports.
“While Capital One and AWS deny all liability, in the interest of avoiding the time, expense and uncertainty of continued litigation, plaintiffs and Capital One have executed a term sheet containing the essential terms of a class settlement that, if approved by this court, will fully resolve all claims brought by plaintiffs,” the bank said according to a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Last year, Capital One agreed to pay $80 million to settle regulators’ claims that it lacked proper cybersecurity procedures as it began to use cloud storage technology.
Capital One has remained one of the financial industry’s earliest and biggest proponents of cloud technology. Last year the bank finished exiting its data centers.
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