Credit card hackers face jail

The US Department of Justice has announced that Albert Gonzalez, along with two others, is responsible for hacking into data from five corporations and stealing over 170 million credit and debit card numbers.

The companies whose security was breached are all large conglomerates, including 7-Eleven, Heartland Payment Systems, Hannaford Brothers Company and two more corporations that have not been identified.

Gonzalez is already on trail for a separate data breach into the TJX system in which 40 million card numbers were stolen from corporations such as OfficeMax, Forever 21, Barnes & Noble, and more.

Additionally, he is also due for trial in New York on a data theft attack on Dave & Buster’s restaurant.

The information was easy enough for Gonzalez and his team to access; they simply looked at the list of Fortune 500 companies and chose a store, at which point Gonzalez would find point of sale machines by heading to the internet line of the store and upload information that his team used as a hacking platform.

Once they were ready to attack they would enter through a SQL attack and use malware to access debit and credit card numbers.

Since the team used proxy computers for all of their attacks it was hard to diagnose where the attacks were actually originating from.

They also tested their malware on twenty or more of the leading anti-virus software on the market to ensure their attacks would go undetected on the corporate networks.