When a Cloud Misconfiguration Costs $190 Million: Ethical Lessons from the Capital One Breach
In July 2019, a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) employee discovered a misconfigured firewall in Capital One's cloud infrastructure. The resulting breach affected over 100 million customers and led to a $190 million settlement . More importantly, it exposed fundamental failures in cloud security that could have been prevented if engineers adhere to code of ethics framework such as ACM. The Anatomy of a Breach The assumptions around the Capital One breach believe the root cause was a misconfigured firewall setting. However, the technical reality was more complex, and the attack sequence exposed control failures. The attacker, Paige Thompson who is a former AWS employee, used TOR and VPN services (specifically IPredator end nodes) to access Capital One's cloud network between March and July 2019. The initial entry point was Capital One's Web Application Firewall (WAF) , specifically, an open-source ModSecurity WAF running on an AWS EC2 instance . However, unlike ma...