While everyone would agree that hacks are terrible and they should not happen, there are instances when they might prove to be good at the same time. We have one such instance in front of one where hacking proved to be beneficial for revealing a scam. In particular, a cryptojacking scheme has been revealed thanks to the Capital One hack. This is the same Capital One hack in which 100 million US and Canadian customers had their data stolen.
It is obvious that this data contained sensitive information such as credit card details as well as personal information. However, a new report now finds something much more grave then what it looks. Paige A. Thompson, the engineer arrested in connection to the hack, has now been indicted charges for not only that hack but also cryptojacking.
Paige has been accused of charges which include wire fraud, computer fraud and abuse. The computer fraud is most probably related to the hack that she carried out. But the interesting part is the mention of wire fraud as well as abuse. According to documents filed against her, she allegedly infiltrated cloud services and probed for potential customers with weak security. If weak systems were found in regards to security, they would be made as servers by her to do crypto mining.
Not only that, but Paige is also accused of affecting other companies with her hacking activities. It is also said that Capital One is not the only major organization that she attacked. She is also found to have gained access to U.S. state agency, a foreign telecom operation, a university, and dozens of others.
Paige was also known to be open to revealing her crypto-jacking activities on her slack accounts. She repeatedly wrote once that “I’ll be employed again soon and if I had a partner I could have them take over my crypto-jacking enterprise and be a stay at home,”