The informant who ran the theft
Working for the Secret Service while running the largest card-theft operation in American history
Albert Gonzalez was recruited as a Secret Service informant after being caught, and helped dismantle a major carding forum in an operation that put many of his former associates in prison.
While doing so he was running his own operation, breaking into retail and payment networks — TJX, Heartland Payment Systems and others — through poorly secured wireless networks and SQL injection, and taking well over a hundred million card numbers. He was sentenced to twenty years.
The industrialisation of card fraud, and the moment payment security stopped being a technical footnote — the direct ancestor of the PCI regime every retailer now lives under.
The Hacker Chronicles
Volume Two — Going Pro
This page is the summary. The chapter — ‘The Informant’ — follows the case properly: what was known at the time, who decided what, and how it actually unfolded rather than how it was later retold.
Two more volumes this year.
Going Geopolitical in October, Going Strategic in December.
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