CapitalOne disclosed that this hack is going to cost them between $100mm and $150mm, which is a lot more than JSTOR would have lost from Aaron Swartz's "hack" of academic humanities papers.
So after coming out of prison and finding a job, which is likely to be hard for a felon, and may not be highly paid, what wages they make will be garnished to pay the criminal/civil financial judgements.
For most people who’ve worked in technology, the potential punishment here would qualify as “destroying your life”. Enormous impact.
If they had fallen victim to some undisclosed zero-day, I’d feel bad for them - but in this case it appears to be misconfigured VPC SGs. Their error. Inadequate processes.
We are also all labouring under the assumption that she was the only person to make off with this data.
I’m willing to bet that she’s just the first one daft enough to talk about it.
If the system was designed by humans, it can be hacked.