- Capital One was recently the victim of a data breach that put the personal information of 106 million people at risk.
- A former Amazon employee is alleged to have taken advantage of a "misconfigured firewall" to steal information from a Capital One server running in the Amazon Web Services cloud.
- Companies like Capital One may not always be able to prevent hackers from breaking in.
- But by encrypting your data, keeping tabs on what exactly is going on across your network, and making sure that only the right people have access to the right information, companies can guard against the very worst of it, experts say.
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Capital One is the latest major corporation to fall victim to a data breach, as it revealed on Monday that an intruder gained access to personal information in an incident that puts 106 million customers at risk.
A former Amazon employee is said to have obtained sensitive Capital One customer data stored on Amazon Web Services, the retailer's massively popular cloud computing service. Federal prosecutors say that the alleged intruder, Paige Thompson, was able to gain access to information like names, addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, and the social security numbers of 140,000 customers and bank account numbers of 80,000 customers.
Companies might not always be able to get ahead of hackers and other bad guys, who are always finding new ways and means to exploit security vulnerabilities and flaws. But experts say there are measures that can be taken to spot intruders quickly and ensure that sensitive data doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
