Should you own Amazon stock? It would certainly be a better investment if its most profitable business, AWS, was growing faster. And the odds of that happening would be better if the industry in which it competes — cloud services — was accelerating. But news that Capital One — a proud AWS customer whose stock plunged over 5% in premarket trade on July 30 — suffered a 106 million customer data breach makes me think it’s possible that AWS’s growth might slow down even more (AWS grew over 40% in previous quarters and slowed to 37% in the latest quarter) and give pause to companies in the middle of moving their IT operations to the cloud. Amazon stock — which trades 7% below its all-time high — is down nearly 1% in pre-market trading on July 30. (I am a Capital One customer and have no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post).Today… Read more

On Monday evening, federal prosecutors said a tech worker named Paige A. Thompson had been charged with computer fraud and abuse on allegations that she stole data from millions of Capital One customers. In the complaint, we get some technical details about how investigators say it went down: A “firewall misconfiguration” left one of Capital One’s cloud servers vulnerable, allowing Thompson to send commands that let her access the sensitive data in question. The complaint doesn’t name the cloud provider used by Capital One in this instance, referring to it only as “Cloud Computing Company.”… Read more