Capital One victim of computer hacking

Capital One, the fifth largest issuer of bankcards in the United States, has had the personal data of 100 million U.S. customers and 6 million Canadian customers stolen. This data contains a lot of personal information such as addresses, phone numbers, payment history and emails.

The crime was committed by a former employee of Amazon Company, host of Capital One's Cloud. The e-commerce company has denied any technical failure on its side and says the flaw came from a poorly configured firewall in the bank.

The U.S. bank has cyber insurance with a ceiling of up to 400 million USD. It generally covers the costs of hacking or data breaches and covers the various legal costs.

Several such cyber-attacks have already taken place. In 2017, the Us credit agency Equifax had the data of 147 million customers stolen. In the same year, the Swiss group Zurich Insurance was sued by the agri-food giant Mondelez over the infection of 1 700 computer servers and 24 000 laptops. A loss estimated to cost 100 million USD.

More recently, Canadian Desjardins Group has suffered the same fate. The data of 2.9 million people was hacked by one of the bank's employees.

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