Capital One reports data breach, says over 100M individuals affected

Capital One Financial Corporation announced that on July 19, 2019, it determined there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers. Capital One immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability that this individual exploited and promptly began working with federal law enforcement. The FBI has arrested the person responsible and that person is in custody. Based on the company’s analysis to date, it believes it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual. “However, we will continue to investigate,” Capital One said. Based on Capital One’s analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada. Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and over 99 percent of Social Security numbers were not compromised. The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of the company’s credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income. Beyond the credit card application data, the individual also obtained portions of credit card customer data, including: Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information; Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018. No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than: About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers; About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers. For Capital One’s Canadian credit card customers, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers were compromised in this incident. “We will notify affected individuals through a variety of channels,” the company said. “We will make free credit monitoring and identity protection available to everyone affected.”