Capital One breach suspect may have hit other companies

A new report looking into the attacker accused in the Capital One breach discovered references to other potential victims, but no corroborating evidence has been found yet.

The FBI accused Paige Thompson, who allegedly went by the name "Erratic" on various online platforms, including an invite-only Slack channel. The Slack channel was first reported on by investigative cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, who pointed out that file names referenced in the channel pointed to other organizations potentially being victims of similar attacks.

A new report by cybersecurity firm CyberInt, based in London, regarding the Capital One breach built on the information discovered by Krebs. Jason Hill, lead cybersecurity researcher at CyberInt, said the company was able to gain access to the Slack channel via an open invitation link.

"This link was obtained from the now-offline 'Seattle Warez Kiddies' Meetup group (Listed as 'Organized by Paige Thomson')," Hill wrote via email. "Based on the publicly available information at the time of report completion, such as Capital One's statement and the [FBI's] Criminal Complaint, we were able to conduct open source intelligence gathering to fill in some of the missing detail and follow social media leads to gain an understanding of the alleged threat actor and their activity over the past months."

According to Hill, CyberInt researchers followed the trail through a GitHub account, GitLab page and a screenshot of a file archival process shared in the Slack channel.

"The right-hand side of the screen appears to show the output of the Linux command 'htop' that lists current processes being executed. In this case, under the 'Command' heading, we can see a number of 'tar --remove-files -cvf - <folder/file>' processes, which are compressing data (and then removing the uncompressed source)," Hill wrote. "These files correlate with the directory listing, and potential other victims, as seen later within the Slack channel."

Between the files named in the screenshot and the corresponding messages in the Slack channel, it appeared as though in addition to the Capital One breach, the threat actor may have stolen 485 GB of data from various other organizations. Some organizations were implied by only file names, such as Ford, but others were named directly by Erratic in messages, including the Ohio Department of Transportation, Michigan State University, Infoblox and Vodafone.

Hill acknowledged that CyberInt did not directly contact any of the organizations named, because the company policy is normally to "contact organizations when our research detects specific vulnerabilities that can be mitigated, or threats detected by our threat intelligence platform.

"However in this case, our research was focused on the Capital One breach to gain an understanding of the threat actor's tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) and resulted in the potential identification of additional victims rather than the identification of any specific vulnerability or ongoing threat," Hill wrote. "Our report offered general advice for those concerned about the TTP based on these findings."

We contacted some of the organizations either directly named or implied via file name in Erratic's Slack channel. The Ohio Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment. Ford confirmed an investigation is underway to determine if the company was the victim of a data breach.

A spokesperson for Michigan State University also confirmed an investigation is underway and the university is cooperating with law enforcement authorities, but at this point there is "no evidence to suggest MSU was compromised."

Similarly, an Infoblox spokesperson said the company was "continuing to investigate the matter, however, at this time, there is no indication that Infoblox was in any way involved with the Capital One breach. Additionally, there is no indication of an intrusion or data breach causing Infoblox customer data to be exposed."

A Vodafone spokesperson claimed the company takes security seriously, but added, "Vodafone is not aware of any information that relates to the Capital One security breach."