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The Seattle super hacker will be released Tuesday. But she won't be free

caption: A photo that Paige Thompson posted to her Twitter page of herself with her cat Millie, who died less than a week before Thompson was arrested for allegedly hacking Capital One. Thompson lived in a house on Beacon Hill at the time of her arrest.
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A photo that Paige Thompson posted to her Twitter page of herself with her cat Millie, who died less than a week before Thompson was arrested for allegedly hacking Capital One. Thompson lived in a house on Beacon Hill at the time of her arrest.
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On Tuesday, the Capital One hacker will be released to a halfway house to await her trial.

Paige Thompson stands accused of stealing records from 106 million Capital One customers.

Thompson’s attorneys argued that as a transgender woman, she should not be held in an all-male jail. A judge agreed.

Paige Thompson will leave jail Tuesday, but she’s not free.

Her location will be monitored by GPS. She can’t touch a computer, or even a flip phone, except for one computer in her lawyer’s office that’s not plugged into the internet. She can’t step foot on any property owned by Amazon, including Whole Foods. That’s because the data she hacked was on Amazon’s cloud.

Still, her friends are happy for her release.

“I’ve missed being able to talk to her whenever I wanted to,” said Mairi Dulaney, who sat in the courtroom audience on Monday to show her support.

Dulaney met Thompson through an online transgender support group four or five years ago. According to Dulaney, it was there that the two bonded over conversations about coding.

Dulaney said being in an all male jail must have been hard on Thompson and believed Thompson would do what it took to avoid returning there.

“I think that she’s had the fear of God, so to speak, put into her,” Dulaney said.

Capital One has also had a scare. After its stock lost around 15% of its value in the month following the breach announcement, it has since regained most of its value. The company faces numerous lawsuits stemming from the breach.

Amazon said the hack happened because Capital One misconfigured a firewall and granted visitors broader permissions than intended. This allowed Thompson to access the files, which included Social Security and bank account numbers.

In a letter to US Senator Ron Wyden, Stephen Schmidt, Amazon’s chief information security officer, praised Capital One for its excellent security practices but wrote that “sometimes humans make mistakes.”

Thompson’s trial is scheduled for March 2 to give the feds time to analyze the 20-30 terabytes of data on Thompson's seized computer.

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