Albert Gonzales: Jailed Miami Man Hacked Into 130 Million Credit Card Accounts: A 28-year-old American, believed by prosecutors to be one of the nation's cybercrime kingpins, was indicted Monday along with two Russian accomplices on charges that they carried out the largest hacking and identity-theft caper in U.S. history. Federal prosecutors alleged the three masterminded a global scheme to steal data from more than 130 million credit and debit cards by hacking into the computer systems of five major companies, including Hannaford Bros. supermarkets, 7-Eleven and Heartland Payment Systems Inc., a credit-card processing company. The indictment in federal district court in New Jersey marks the latest and largest in at least five years of crime that has brought its alleged orchestrator, Albert Gonzalez of Miami, in and out of federal grasp. Detained in 2003, Mr. Gonzalez was briefly an informant to the Secret Service before he allegedly returned to commit even bolder crimes. Authorities have previously alleged that Mr. Gonzalez was the ringleader of a data breach that siphoned off more than 40 million credit-card numbers from TJX Cos. and others in recent years, costing the parent company of the TJ Maxx retail chain about $200 million. Mr. Gonzalez is in federal custody in Brooklyn, N.Y., awaiting trial for alleged efforts to hack into the network of the national restaurant chain Dave & Buster's Inc. He also faces charges in Boston in the TJX matter. The alleged thefts in Monday's indictment took place from October 2006 to May 2008. Mr. Gonzalez is "a very important player in a sophisticated ring that has real results at the street level of bank, retail, debit- and credit-card fraud," said Seth Kosto, an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who specializes in computer fraud. The indictment, interviews and recent court documents in the cases pending against Mr. Gonzalez paint him as a rising star in the cyber underground. He launched what he called "operation get rich or die tryin," targeting Fortune 500 companies with his data-theft operations, according to a sentencing memo filed in federal district court in Massachusetts in the TJ Maxx matter. These documents say he threw himself a $75,000 birthday party and at one point lamented he had to count more than $340,000 by hand because his money counter had broken. Such large sums, primarily in $20 bills allegedly stolen from ATMs, proved tough to manage, the sentencing memo says. He was considering investing in a club, but told one of his co-conspirators in the TJX heist that he would only be able to pull together $300,000 in a "legitimate appearing form" like a check, according to the documents. Federal investigators say Mr. Gonzalez is a high-school graduate and self-taught programmer who cut his criminal teeth as a leader in the self-styled Shadowcrew, an online credit-card hacking ring. In 2004, 26 leaders of the 4,000-person ring were arrested and convicted. "He was one of the key leaders," said Scott Christie, a former U.S. prosecutor who worked on the case. Mr. Gonzalez wasn't charged when he was arrested in 2003 because he agreed to become an informant for the Secret Service following his arrest, say Justice Department officials. In November 2004, the government permitted him to move from New Jersey to Florida. Much of the subsequent hacking took place there, according to court records. He was arrested in conjunction with the Dave & Buster's hacking scheme in May 2008 and has been in detention since. Subsequent investigations into breaches at Heartland and others led investigators back to Mr. Gonzalez. They found that he and his co-conspirators in Russia, which the indictment does not name, staged their crime on a network of computers spanning New Jersey, California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine that would infiltrate the computer networks of the victim companies. In computer attacks lasting more than a year, the trio allegedly scooped up credit- and debit-card numbers and installed so-called back doors in the victims' computer networks to enable them to steal more data in the future, the indictment said. They also installed "sniffer" programs to capture card data and send it to the hackers. The indictment didn't estimate the losses associated with the alleged activities, nor did it spell out how the alleged co-conspirators may have made money off the stolen numbers. Typically, hackers sell batches of credit-card data online -- the current asking price in online forums is $10 to more than $100 per account profile, depending on the account's limit. The trio made extensive efforts to conceal their activities, registering the computers they used under false names and communicating online under a variety of screen names, the indictment alleges. Mr. Gonzalez often used the online alias "soupnazi," an apparent reference to a character in the sitcom "Seinfeld." The three were charged with gaining unauthorized access to computers, computer fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Mr. Gonzalez faces up to 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. His lawyer did not return phone calls Monday. "We're pleased that the authorities have aggressively pursued this case to be in a position to bring an indictment against the alleged perpetrators," said Michael Norton, a spokesman for Hannaford Bros. Heartland commended the government's sleuthing in the case; 7-Eleven declined to comment. Wire fraud, conducted in cyberspace because wire transfers now use networks that connect to the Internet, has exploded in recent years. The Treasury Department recently reported that of the more than 55,000 incidents of wire fraud since 1998, more than half of them occurred in the past two years. "The financial sector may be more secure than most, but it's hemorrhaging," said Tom Kellermann, a former cybersecurity official with the World Bank who is now a vice president with Core Security Technologies, a cybersecurity company. "For too long a time they have not paid enough respect to the sophistication and organization of the underground economy." source : http://online.wsj.com/ Your request is being processed...