More US Lawmakers Questioning Capital One, Amazon

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has written to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, raising questions about what happened in Capital One’s data breach, questioning the security practices followed by Amazon Web Services, and how the company secures its cloud-based AWS Simple Storage Service, popularly known as “S3 buckets.”

The FBI alleges that the Capital One hacker bypassed a misconfigured firewall within the bank’s network and then gained access to where data was stored within the cloud infrastructure the company used. Amazon’s customers are responsible for securing their S3 buckets, but Wyden in his letter asks Amazon why multiple customers might be having the same security problem with them.

The data breach – and what Capital One and Amazon could have done to prevent it – has drawn attention from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who want to question executives from both companies. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee raised concerns with Bezos and Amazon Web Service over security protocols and requested the full committee thoroughly review the data breach.