A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 , 2019
Economy & Business
ECONOMY
Consumer spending,
incomes up in June
Consumer spending rose a
healthy 0.3 percent in June,
slightly below the strong gains of
the past three months, while
incomes turned in a solid
0.4 percent gain for the fourth
straight month.
The Commerce Department
said Tuesday that the spending
increase followed strong gains of
1 percent in March, 0.6 percent in
April and 0.5 percent in May
following a lackluster start to the
year.
An inflation gauge favored by
the Federal Reserve showed prices
rising 1.4 percent over the past
year, well below the Fed’s 2 percent
inflation target.
The overall economy slowed to
a growth rate of 2.1 percent in the
April-June quarter, from
3.1 percent in the first quarter, as
the trade deficit widened and
businesses cut back on capital
investment.
Consumer spending grew at an
annual rate of 4.3 percent in the
second quarter after a
disappointingly weak 1.1 percent
gain in the first quarter.
— Associated PressTECHNOLOGYChina helped Apple’s
earnings beat targetsApple’s quarterly profit and
revenue beat Wall Street targets
Tuesday, and its forecast for
fourth-quarter sales topped
expectations, as well, with chief
executive Tim Cook telling Reuters
that “marked improvement ingreater China” drove the results.
Services revenue in the fiscal
third quarter rose 12.6 percent to
$11.46 billion, a record, but missed
expectations of $11.73 billion,
according to IBES data from
Refinitiv.
IPhone sales fell 12 percent to
$25.99 billion, about in line with
expectations of $25.96 billion,
according to Refinitiv data.
Apple shares were up
3.5 percent to $216.10 in after-
hours trading after the news.
Cook told Reuters that results
for mainland China, a subset of
Apple’s greater China region, were
positive.
Apple said it expects revenue for
the current fiscal fourth quarter of
$61 billion to
$64 billion, compared with analyst
estimates of $61.02 billion.
— ReutersALSO IN BUSINESS
U.S. home prices rose at a slower
pace in May, a sign that many
would-be buyers are finding
properties unaffordable. The S&P
CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city
home price index increased
2.4 percent in May from a year
earlier. That marked a slight
deceleration from the 2.5 percent
year-over-year gain in April. The
sluggish price growth stems
largely from the most expensive
markets, where years of price
growth have undermined
affordability.DirecTV Now customers received
notices Tuesday saying the name
of that service has been changed to
AT&T TV Now. The move comes as
AT&T tests a separate live
television service with fewer
channels called AT&T TV. Thatversion, which requires high-
speed Internet access, is being
tested in some markets this
summer before a wider rollout. It
will contain live channels, a trove
of on-demand program options
and access to popular apps such as
Netflix. At least for now, AT&T is
retaining the DirecTV brand for
the pioneering satellite TV service.
Five major retailers were
targeted in lawsuits filed in Los
Angeles federal court Tuesday by
the University of California over
what it called the “existential
threat” posed by foreign
manufacturers that are accused of
infringing schools’ patents.
Amazon, Walmart, Target, Ikea
and Bed Bath & Beyond were
accused of infringing four of the
university’s patents related to
“filament” LED lightbulbs, which
use less energy and last longer
than traditional lightbulbs.(Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos
owns The Washington Post.) The
university also asked the U.S.
International Trade Commission
to open a probe into the retailers’
conduct related to the importing
of lightbulbs.
Procter & Gamble on Tuesday
reported a fiscal fourth-quarter
loss of $5.24 billion, after reporting
a profit in the same period a year
earlier. The Cincinnati-based
company said it had a loss of $2.
per share. Earnings, adjusted for
asset impairment costs and
restructuring costs, came to $1.
per share. The results surpassed
Wall Street expectations. The
average estimate of nine analysts
surveyed by Zacks Investment
Research was for earnings of $1.
per share. The consumer products
maker posted revenue of
$17.09 billion in the period.
— From news reportsDIGESTBY HANNAH KNOWLESWeeks before she was arrest-
ed, Paige Thompson was getting
ready to euthanize her cat.
The 33-year-old Seattle pro-
grammer was pained like any
loving pet owner, tweeting that
her cat Millie’s health would
“only get worse” and that she
“just can’t see her go through this
misery anymore.”
Her next tweet took a darker
turn. Thompson wrote that she
planned to check into a mental
hospital after her ordeal with
Millie was over.
“I have a whole list of things
that will ensure my involuntary
confinement from the world,”
she wrote July 5. “The kind that
they can’t ignore or brush off
onto the crisis clinic. I’m never
coming back.”
On Monday, Thompson was
accused in one of the largest data
breaches to strike a financial
services company. A criminal
complaint, which cited Thomp-
son’s Twitter account, says the
software developer stole
100 million credit card applica-
tions from Capital One, exposing
140,000 Social Security numbers
and 80,000 bank account num-
bers in the latest testament to the
vulnerability of personal data
online.
Thompson’s tweets — some-
times typo-riddled, sometimes
profane, often in all lowercase
letters — came from an account
under a stylized version of “Er-
ratic,” the alias linking her vari-
ous online profiles. Authorities
traced Thompson from the mes-
saging platform Slack to her
accounts in places such as Twit-
ter and the code-sharing website
GitHub, where authorities say
she posted the stolen data for all
to see under her real name and
email address.
Many of Thompson’s online
footprints are gone now, leaving
only broken URLs. Her LinkedIn
page says “Profile not found.”
The personal website listed on
her résumé was taken down. The
programming group she once
ran on Meetup.com, dubbed “Se-
attle Warez Kiddies,” no longer
exists.
But other parts of the onlineidentity that helped the FBI
build its case remain.
Thompson’s Twitter posts
show no inkling from the soft-
ware developer that her name
would soon be in the news, after
Capital One disclosed the hack
Monday. A day earlier, Thomp-
son was retweeting her usual mix
of programmer jargon (“need to
write a scraper for this”), Inter-
net slang (“wrekt”) and other
musings.
On Friday, she was still
mourning her cat. She tweeted
that she couldn’t wash some-
thing because Millie had been
euthanized on it.
One of Erratic’s posts from the
day before the Capital One hack-
ing news broke simply said,
“sigh.”
But privately, Thompson ac-
knowledged the risks of what she
was doing with Capital One data,
according to court documents.
“Ive basically strapped myself
with a bomb vest... dropping
capitol ones dox and admitting
it,” she wrote in a direct message
to another Twitter user captured
in images included in the crimi-
nal complaint.
Others Thompson interacted
with online noted the danger of
her alleged hacking exploits, too.
“don’t go to jail plz,” someone
on Slack told Thompson after
she described the sensitive files
she had, court documents state.
But Thompson said she wanted
the files off her server.
“I gotta find somewhere to
store it,” she wrote.
Savvy by her own account in a
litany of programming languag-
es, operating systems and tools,
Thompson was a systems engi-
neer at Amazon Web Services for
about a year and a half until the
fall of 2016, according to a résu-
mé posted online.
Before working on issues such
as automation and security up-
dates at Amazon, the document
indicates, she spent a decade in a
host of other tech roles, rarely
staying at the same company for
more than one year.
Some jobs were based in
Washington; for others, she tele-
commuted. (Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington
Post.)
The education history on
Thompson’s résumé is much
sparser. For her 2005 and 2006
stint at Bellevue College in Wash-
ington state, there’s just a brief
bullet point: “Left to pursue a
career opportunity.”
[email protected]Hacking suspect
allegedly left a trail
Court documents:
Woman discussed data
she is accused of stealingBY TAYLOR TELFORD
AND HANNAH DENHAMThe personal information of
more than 100 million credit card
applicants was compromised in
the Capital One hack announced
Monday, illustrating once again
just how vulnerable consumer
data can be even for the most
security-minded organizations.
The hack, one of the largest ever
against a financial services firm,
comes just days after the
credit-reporting company Equifax
reached a $700 million settlement
with U.S. regulators over the high-
profile 2017 cyberattack that ex-
posed the data of 147 million peo-
ple.
FBI agents arrested a Seattle
software engineer, Paige A.
Thompson, on accusations of com-
puter fraud. The bank says the
hack exposed 140,000 Social Secu-
rity numbers and 80,000 bank
account numbers, as well as credit
scores, balances and personal in-
formation such as addresses,
birthdays and contact informa-
tion. Roughly 6 million Canadian
customers also were affected, Cap-
ital One said.
Worried your data might have
been exposed in the hack? Here’s
how to make sure your accounts
are secure and to safeguard your-
self against future attacks.Check your accounts for
suspicious activity
Capital One will notify custom-
ers affected by the breach and is
offering free credit monitoring
and identity protection.
In the meantime, check your
recent credit card statements and
bank account transactions for
suspicious activity. You should
also check your credit report to
see if any false accounts or credit
cards have been opened in your
name. Report any concerning ac-
tivity to your bank immediately.Freeze your credit
Freezing your credit is a crucial
step in identity protection, as itensures no one, including banks,
can access your credit reports
without your permission. You can
freeze your credit for no cost, either
online or by phone, according to
Ted Rossman, a CreditCards.com
analyst.
“The number one thing con-
sumers should do to protect their
identities is to freeze their credit by
contacting Equifax, Experian and
TransUnion,” Rossman said. “This
is the best way to prevent a crimi-
nal from opening an unauthorized
account in your name. Unfortu-
nately, only about 1 in 4 U.S. adults
have frozen their credit.”
If freezing your credit is not an
option, you can contact a credit
bureau to set up fraud alerts, said
Daniel Markuson, a digital priva-
cy expert at NordVPN.Change your passwords often
Rossman said a poll by Credit-
Cards.com found that more than
80 percent of adults in the United
States reuse their passwords. Set-
ting up two-factor authentica-tion, a second level of logging
into your personal accounts, also
is a good idea, whether that is
through a text message sent to
your phone or an external app
such as Google Authenticator.Stay alert for possible scams
Because the hack involved a
great deal of personal information,
it is possible it could lead to a rise
in phishing scams, Markuson said
“Personalized phishing messag-
es are designed to look as if they
are coming from a legitimate bank
or other familiar organization,” he
said. “Such scams are usually very
effective as criminals use a piece of
real information, for example,
your name and address.”
To protect yourself from scam-
mers, do not click links from par-
ties you do not trust. Also do not
give out personal information over
the phone, even if the person
contacting you claims to represent
a trusted organization.
[email protected]
[email protected]How to protect your data from future attacks
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$1=108.62 YEN, EURO=$1.BY RACHEL SIEGELIn 2015, Capital One’s chief in-
formation officer, Rob Alexander,
promoted the steps the bank had
taken to protect its financial data.
In his keynote address at an Ama-
zon Web Services conference, Al-
exander said Capital One had
looked to AWS to meet customer
demand, cut back on its data cen-
ters and boost security, especially
since “the financial services indus-
try attracts some of the worst
cybercriminals.”
Four years later, Capital One
was ensnared in one of the largest-
ever hacks of a big financial insti-
tution. And in the end, its embrace
of cloud services could not save
roughly 100 million credit card
applicants in the United States
from their data being compro-
mised.
Federal agents in Seattle arrest-
ed Paige A. Thompson, 33, who
was accused this week of breaking
through a misconfigured Capital
One firewall. The hole meant a
hacker could reach the server
where Capital One was storing its
information and access customer
data.
Amazon told the New YorkTimes that its cloud had stored the
Capital One data. But the bank
said that “this type of vulnerability
is not specific to the cloud,” noting
it was able to quickly diagnose and
fix the issue because of its “cloud
operating model.” Amazon told
the Times that it found no evi-
dence that its underlying cloud
services were compromised.
Amazon did not respond to a
request for comment Tuesday.
(Amazon founder and chief execu-
tive Jeff Bezos owns The Washing-
ton Post.)
On Monday, the Virginia-based
bank said a hacker had accessed
roughly 100 million credit card
applications. Federal prosecutors
say the breach also included
140,000 Social Security numbersand 80,000 bank account num-
bers, culled from tens of millions
of credit card applications. Capital
One said the data came from ap-
plications that customers and
small businesses submitted from
2005 to early 2019. The bank said
the hack will cost the company
$100 million to $150 million in the
near term.
The hack comes just days after
Equifax, a credit reporting compa-
ny, announced it had reached a
$700 million settlement with fed-
eral regulators over a 2017 cyber-
attack that exposed the personal
information of 147 million people.
Capital One has been a leading
advocate in the banking world for
cloud services. The company is
migrating more of its applicationsand data to the cloud, Bloomberg
reported, and plans to be done
with its data centers by the end of- Other financial companies
have been more wary of cloud
services, largely for security rea-
sons.
Cloud-hosting services such as
AWS are attractive to companies
looking to cut costs, said Jonathan
Stone, chief technology officer for
the IT consulting firm Kelser.
Building and running data centers
carries a hefty price tag, often tens
of millions of dollars. But with a
third-party service, “you can be an
expert in your business and not
necessarily have to know how all
the plumbing works,” Stone said.
That assurance did not protect
Capital One from its own firewall
issue, which federal officials say
allowed the hacker to break
through. Thompson was an AWS
employee who last worked at
Amazon in 2016, a company
spokesman told Bloomberg. The
spokesman said the breach Capi-
tal One described did not require
insider knowledge.
Though the bank missed the
firewall issue on its own, it moved
quickly to remedy it, Stone said.
But the hack also raises questions
about how companies handle and
store historical data, such as credit
card applications going back more
than a decade. “The more stuff you
have laying around,” Stone said,
“the more chance you have of
something bad happening with it.”
[email protected]Capital One embraced cloud, but that couldn’t stop hack
AKHTAR SOOMRO/REUTERSShopkeepers chat Tuesday as they wait out the rain in a fabric shop at a wholesale market in Karachi, Pakistan. This was
the second day in a row that monsoon rains hit the southern port city, triggering floods and power outages.
Waiting out the storm
Hole in the bank’s
own firewall led to
major data breach