Federal prosecutors charged a former government informant on Monday with the largest case of credit and debit card data theft ever in the US. They accused the man of swiping 130 million accounts on top of 40 million he stole previously.
Albert Gonzalez, 28, who lives in Florida, broke his record for identity theft by hacking into retail networks, prosecutors said, adding that his illicit computer exploits ended when he went to jail on charges stemming from an earlier case.
Gonzalez is a one-time informant for the US Secret Service, which he helped hunt hackers, authorities said. The agency later found out that he also had been working with criminals and feeding them information on investigations, even warning off at least one individual, authorities said.
Gonzalez, already in jail awaiting trial in a hacking case, was indicted on Monday in the state of New Jersey and charged with conspiring with two other unidentified suspects to steal the private information. Prosecutors said the goal was to sell the stolen data to others.
Prosecutors said Gonzalez, who is known online as “soupnazi,” targeted customers of convenience store giant 7-Eleven Inc and supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers Co Inc. He also targeted Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey-based card payment processor.
The indictment said Gonazalez and his two Russian co-conspirators would hack into corporate computer networks and secretly place “malware,” or malicious software, that would allow them back-door access to the networks later to steal data.
Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the new charges. His lawyer did not immediately return a call for comment.
Gonzalez is awaiting trial next month in New York state for allegedly helping hack the computer network of the national restaurant chain Dave and Buster’s.
The US Justice Department said the new case was the biggest alleged credit and debit card data breach ever charged in the US, based on a scheme that began in October 2006.
Gonzalez allegedly devised a sophisticated attack to penetrate the computer networks, steal the card data and send that data to computer servers in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine.
Also last year, the Justice Department announced additional charges against Gonzalez and others for hacking retail companies’ computers for the theft of approximately 40 million credit cards. At the time, that was believed to have been the biggest single case of hacking private computer networks to steal credit card data, puncturing the electronic defenses of retailers including T.J. Maxx, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority and OfficeMax.
Prosecutors charged that Gonzalez was the ringleader of the hackers in that case.
At the time of those charges, officials said the alleged thieves were not computer geniuses, just opportunists who used a technique called “wardriving,” which involved cruising through different areas with a laptop computer and looking for accessible wireless Internet signals. Once they located a vulnerable network, they installed so-called “sniffer programs” that captured credit and debit card numbers as they moved through a retailer’s processing networks.
Gonzalez faces a possible life sentence if convicted in that case.
Restaurants are among the most common targets for hackers, experts said, because they often fail to update their anti-virus software and other computer security systems.
Scott Christie, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in New Jersey, said the case showed that despite the best efforts by companies to protect data privacy, there remained individuals capable of sneaking in.
“Cases like this do cause companies to sit up and take notice that this is a problem and more needs to be done,” Christie said.
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