Payleap recognizes the importance of an up to date security system, and as a result, your online transactions are closely monitored and protected. However, not all businesses maintain a superior computer security system, and their customers’ credit card data might have been amongst the hundreds of millions of records to be stolen by Albert Gonzalez, the world’s largest identity thief.
Gonzalez, 28, a former informant for the U.S Secret Service, known online as “soupnazi,” has been indicted in the nation’s two biggest identity theft cases. As an informant, Gonzales worked with the agency to track hunters. It was eventually discovered that “he had been [aiding] criminals and feeding them with information on ongoing investigations, even warning off at least one individual, according to authorities.”
The Miami Herald reported today that as the result of a plea deal, Gonzalez will serve at least 15 years in prison for his participation in a plot to steal more than 40 million credit-card records from retailers. Earlier, it was assumed to be “the biggest single case of hacking private computer networks to steal credit card data, puncturing the defenses of retailers including TJ Maxx, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, and OfficeMax… At the time of those charges, officials said the alleged thieves weren’t 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” (The Associated Press).
However, 15 years may be just the beginning of a long sentence for Gonzalez. He will return to court next month for another case in which he is accused of stealing more than 130 million records from a national credit-card processing center, a supermarket chain and the 7-Eleven chain. In this scheme, “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.”
While Gonzalez’s sentencing is a triumph for his millions of victims, Payleap users have remained restfully unharmed by the threats of identity thieves. To read more about our efforts to keep your information safe, visit “Online Merchant Accounts: Security is Key.”
Tags: albert gonzalez, indentity theft, News, security, soupnazi
