Paige Thompson, Capital One Hacking Suspect, Left a Trail Online

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/business/paige-thompson-capital-one-hack.html

by eastbayjake • 7 years ago

27 45 7 years ago

ishtanbul• 7 years ago

its like she wanted to get caught

A fine example of why the push for encryption backdoors is wrong-footed: we can reliably trust people to be idiots online, regardless of intent or skill level.

good opsec is hard; middling opsec is reasonably easy; "not bragging about your mad sploits on twitter" is nothing we can trust humans to reasonably do, apparently!

tareqak• 7 years ago

I agree: there is no such thing as "the perfect crime" and the use of end-to-end encryption does not make it so. What there is a however is a lack of good, old-fashioned police-work in criminal cases where the police run up against end-to-end encryption.

whenchamenia2• 7 years ago

How are we getting past the NYT PayWall now?

yonaguska• 7 years ago

disabling JS seems to work.

kencausey• 7 years ago

Yes, I use uMatrix to block everything but HTML (I enable other features site by site) and with nothing but HTML Reader mode in Firefox appears to give me the full article content.

taesu• 7 years ago

I guess outline.com doesn't work ? damn these paywalls

jakewins• 7 years ago

We need to re-learn to pay for journalism. Well funded independent journalists is critical to a working society. If you can afford it, please consider taking the paywall as a cue to consider getting a subscription.

whenchamenia2• 7 years ago

Nyt needs to show a bit better restraint before I can consider funding them for 'good journalism'. I can and do subscribe to/fund what I find to be reliably good journalism.

owlninja• 7 years ago

Subscription is on sale for $1 a week

danso2• 7 years ago

If you're on desktop, isn't it trivial enough to remove/reset cookies from the nytimes.com domain?

appleshore• 7 years ago

If you paste the link into archive.is, it’ll often be already archived or it will save a fresh copy.

I would encourage people — if they can afford it — to pay for a few media sites online.

kevincrane• 7 years ago

This has worked pretty well for getting me past the paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription

astura• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/l5vR7

dsr_• 7 years ago

If we assume that Ms. Thompson is generally terrible at opsec, then presumably she is also terrible at offensive security, which leads to one of two conclusions:

Either:

A: She is being framed.

B: Capital One's security was (and probably still is) laughable.

She doesn't seem to be being framed. If Capital One's security is horrendous, they are unlikely to be exceptional... so we will see much more of this.

izend• 7 years ago

This tweet alone seems to indicate she definitely did it...

https://twitter.com/0xA3A97B6C/status/1151901325598187521

th3iedkid• 7 years ago

Isn’t all of that anyway in AWS docs ? Would something like this stand as an evidence to implicate her in US courts?

mieseratte2• 7 years ago

If we assume that Ms. Thompson is generally terrible at opsec, then presumably she is also terrible at offensive security,

One can possess great technical skills and still be a braggart. Nothing about a lack of OPSEC implies she cannot exploit a vulnerable system.

danso2• 7 years ago

I was confused by this line in the affidavit (page 9):

An April 19, 2019, post in the Github account of "paige•••••thompson" includes a "Server List" of IP addresses associated with the account.

What Github "post" could this be referring to? A README.md/issue/comment in which she for some reason posted the IP addresses she uses with that account?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/press-release/file/1188626...

amyjess• 7 years ago

The first thing that comes to mind is a gist.

bin04• 7 years ago

Correct. Some gists were still up yesterday when I looked (her github was down, though), and it seems she had a habit of posting logs of stuff, text snippets, etc. there.

usmannk• 7 years ago

Probably these: https://gist.github.com/paigeadelethompson?direction=desc&so...

Susanoo• 7 years ago

They also left a GitLab trail - https://gitlab.com/netcrave. We are looking at erratic, whereas they were https://github.com/netcrave

toofy• 7 years ago

I used to feel what you likely feel about paying for news—why would i pay for this when some other site will have it up for free or with ads, capitalism at work, competition driving the price down to reasonable levels, etc...

Then I realized after seeing what has happened as the masses all came online, while many of us here can probably distinguish between a reliable news source and a hack site or a propaganda outlet—a disturbingly large segment of the population can not.

And to make matters worse, there seems to be a huge number of people who don’t realize they don’t have what it takes to do reliable research to write a story and they don’t have what it takes to understand nuanced subjects in order to explain the subject to readers. Or even worse, they fully realize how ill-equipped they are but don’t care because vulnerable people will still click their ads.

Long story short, I now have just short of 20 subscriptions. Including a few that I rarely read but to me it’s worth it. The collective We really need to increase the signal levels in order to hear over the noise.

Journalism is definitely one of those cases where The Market can easily lead to a race to the bottom situation. Hopefully we’ll see it correct and good journalism will overtake trash, but wow what a rough spot.

Overtonwindow2• 7 years ago

I don’t pay for news. Ever.

tvanantwerp• 7 years ago

I would pay to never see "news" again. Bombarded every day by meaningless trivialities wrapped in opinion. If something important happened that I needed to know about, I'd probably miss it for all the celebrity gossip and political posturing that actually makes the front page.

cgriswald• 7 years ago

In the context of HN, I don't think that solves the problem. What are the odds that your 20 subscriptions and my 20 subscriptions will overlap? (To say nothing about excluding people who can't afford 20 subscriptions.) In order to have a meaningful discussion about a topic, we needn't necessarily have the same subscriptions. But to have a meaningful discussion about the article, we certainly both need access to the article.

Pay-per-article might make some sense, but every time I've seen that they've charged more than I think it's worth. They generally want about a dollar, and I'm thinking pennies. And, of course, I have to decide whether it's worth purchasing before I've read it; at which point it comes down to trusting the publisher - and then maybe I should just get a subscription.

bin04• 7 years ago

What are the odds that your 20 subscriptions and my 20 subscriptions will overlap?

The odds that they will completely overlap are low. However, most people don't have 20. Even those who do mostly read a number of prominent sources: nyt, wapo, wsj are the big three for news these days. Most people subscribe to one, maybe two and read that. This is arguably bad for competition and bad for "indie journalism".

Also, I take issue with some of the points of view espoused by the nyt. Their news content is fairly good (if biased), but my subscription would also go to pay their editorial board. I don't want to purchase that news, because I don't want to fund its production. I wish I could buy a news-only subscription: no "lifestyle", no "fashion", no "editorial", etc. I don't want that stuff. Just news.

matthoiland• 7 years ago

This was the kick in the pants I needed to finally subscribe. Thanks.

dang• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20567021 and marked it off-topic.

Overtonwindow2• 7 years ago

I don’t understand why he would brag about it online. Isn’t that just asking to be caught??

hestipod• 7 years ago

Don't underestimate the power of ego. For most people it's their most powerful driving force. I cannot speak to her motivations. There is more than one plausible reason someone would expose themselves IF she in fact did and wasn't set up. But people "own" themselves all the time despite how intuitively ridiculous it sounds from the armchair.

shrimp_emoji• 7 years ago

Is it not meant damnable in us to be trumpeters of our unlawful intents?

saagarjha• 7 years ago

*she

drenvuk• 7 years ago

So this guy is a crazy braggart. This isn't the first time this has happened. Some other guy was taunting the FBI and left metadata in one of his images when he posted to Twitter.

It's best to not be loud in the first place.

Nicksil• 7 years ago

So this guy is a crazy braggart.

Clearly not a guy

bin04• 7 years ago

Guy can be used in a gender-neutral sense, though it's not really good grammar. Most romance languages use male for a collective group; people often replicate this in English (though not always, as not all our words for groups carry gender). Some people then extend this back to the singular, i.e. "hey (many) guys" -> "hey (one) guy".

Edit: Down-votes care to comment why?

mieseratte2• 7 years ago

Say what you will about using the desired pronouns, Paige is extremely androgynous. Saying she is "Clearly not a guy" is inaccurate.

kgwgk2• 7 years ago

Not so clearly.

bin04• 7 years ago

Miss Thompson wins the Darwin Award for black hats. Seriously, she did a horrible job. Clearly a supremely over-confident script kiddie who went around talking about being such a 1337 h4x0r... until the cops showed up.

Serves her right, any way. You've got to be a pretty bad person to put the information of that many people at risk.

benrrio• 7 years ago

Krebs has a good write up on this [1]. The part I found most interesting is there appears to be a couple dozen companies compromised by Paige, Cap One is the only one I have seen in the news.

1: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/capital-one-data-theft-i...

kgwgk2• 7 years ago

“Honestly if I were president I would give her an immediate pardon. Either she is innocent and is being rather unsubtly framed, or she is guilty and no punishment can compare to the embarrassment of being caught like this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-30/tipster-s...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-30/beyond...

strikelaserclaw• 7 years ago

It seems like she had mental problems. Hopefully she gets help instead of the gov't seeking retribution.

Freedomfyter808• 7 years ago

Check out #freeshane on Twitter or fb. Been getting turned into gibberish or blocked. I know the mastermind is almost blind so screenshots work tho they even used my own cousin against me

She was only transwoman allowed in the ZCLUB per mgt. She got drugged and used as scapegoat. I woke up in Swedish Edmonds. Idiots let me go once they realized my comps were at my hotel. I screamed I'm gonnna be pissed if I miss my hotel brunch. It was 2a not afternoon. Claim I assaulted 4 shorelines PD. Never hit anyone in my life. I lack fight or flight, no stimuli hence was great at piecing this together and my partner and I dodged a ton of traps ourself. Palantir is here folks and it starts with the gays for monied daddies

Frightenly involves my partner who went Mia from his probation in a coerced LEAD program participant by his "daddy landlord who encouraged employement at z though it would expose to drugs. Conviently probation revoked and a month in Valentines got my first STD because we were being sober, but he was too tired to entertain zClub's "John" James Booth of barebackrts video and hookup Discovered too much underground for me tho porn stars were a thrill, but tech is here folks i am lucky I have money and funding but others are very verenable like Paige and my partner Shane. I've seen 1999 citations close in 2009. It's the poor being rats to each other for the rich's vigilante. Hope to hear her out, bc when I talk to my partner he has a hard time too--we all have antibiotic allergy that seizures and we forget. They tried to in Swedish, but i was not a product of Seattle "LEAD" program where they force you an intensive CDAT to find your deep lvl 3 panic triggers, conveniently paid by the LEAD fundraisers. See #freeshane Twitter fb is showing blocked by DOS

Paige Thompson, Capital One Hacking Suspect, Left a Trail Online

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