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Thompson threatened “suicide by cop” and to shoot up a Silicon Valley office.
Sean Gallagher
– Aug 14, 2019 10: 34 pm UTC
Enlarge / Paige Thompson, 33, a former Seattle technology company software engineer, was arrested after she boasted about a massive data theft from Capital One on GitHub. She is now accused of 30 other data thefts.
In a petition filed on August 13 in federal court in Seattle, the Justice Department asserted that Paige Thompson—the former Amazon employee accused of stealing data from Capital One credit card applications—had done far more, including “major cyber intrusions that resulted in the theft of massive amounts of data from what now appears to be more than 30 victim companies.” US Attorney for Western Washington Brian Moran’s filing was for a motion to keep Thompson imprisoned until trial because she is a flight risk and “has a long history of threatening behavior that includes repeated threats to kill others, to kill herself, and to commit suicide by cop.”
Aside from Capital One, the victim organizations have not been named by Justice officials, but the filing stated that they included “other companies, educational institutions, and other entities.” The data from these sources reviewed thus far appears largely to not include personal information.
“At this point, however, the government is continuing to work to identify specific entities from which data was stolen, as well as the type of data stolen from each entity,” Moran wrote in his filing. “The government expects to add an additional charge against Thompson based upon each such theft of data, as the victims are identified and notified.”
Thompson is not believed to have sold or shared any of the data she stole or profited from it in any way. The copy of the data recovered by law enforcement during the search of Thompson’s home “is the only copy of the stolen data that she created,” the filing states, but “it is too early to confirm that this is the case…the government is continuing its investigation, which will take a significant amount of time and resources, given the immense amount of forensic evidence to review.”
Thompson, who called herself “erratic” online, “appears to have significant mental-health issues,” and she would be a threat to others and herself if released, Moran’s filing explained. Thompson said in a direct message thread on Twitter that she was “ready to check the fuck out” and that she “prefer[red] to die, and something to make it easy.” She also threatened to kill police in a Twitter post, as well as the person who called them.
A threatening Twitter post from Thompson .
“Ready to check out.”
In 2018, two people filed for protection orders against Thompson. And police had been called to Thompson’s home twice in 2019. In March, she “became violent with her housemates” and then threatened to use a fake gun to commit “suicide by cop” when the police were called. In May, Moran stated, “police were called to Thompson’s residence after Thompson contacted an acquaintance at a California technology office and threatened to travel to the company’s campus in California and to ‘shoot up’ the office.” One of Thompson’s roommates had a collection of assault rifles, Moran said.