Hacker Record: Albert Gonzalez. 20 years in prison and 170 million stolen credit cards

Albert Gonzalez (1981) is an American computer hacker and computer criminal who is accused of the combined theft of credit card data and the subsequent resale of more than 170 million cards and bank numbers from 2005 to 2007 - the largest fraud of this kind in history.

Gonzalez and his associates used SQL injection to deploy backdoors to several corporate systems to launch a packet sniffer (in particular, ARP spoofing ), which allowed him to steal data from internal corporate networks.
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During his binge, he was said to have spent $ 75,000 to a birthday party and complained that he had to count $ 340,000 manually due to the fact that his currency and accounting machine had broken down.

Gonzalez received three federal charges:

• In May 2008 in New York in the case of Dave & Busters (the trial was held in September 2009)
• In May 2008 in Massachusetts in the case of TJ Maxx (the trial was held in early 2010)
• August 2009 in New Jersey in connection with Heartland Payment.

On March 25, 2010, Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Gonzalez and his team were featured in the 5th episode of the season of the CNBC series “American Greed” titled “Hackers: Get Rich Or Die Tryin Operation”.

Publication support is Edison , which develops geolocation games with orcs and demons and CRM systems for coordinating branch operations .

Early life

Gonzalez's parents, who immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the 1970s, bought Albert the first computer when he was 8 years old.

He went to Miami High School, Florida, where he was described as the “problem” leader of computer nerds. In 2000, he moved to New York, where he lived for three months before moving to Kearney, New Jersey.


Gonzalez in 2001 at DefCon in Las Vegas

ShadowCrew

While in Kearney, he was accused of being the inspiration for a group of hackers called ShadowCrew, which placed 1.5 million stolen credit cards and ATM numbers for sale. Though considered the mastermind of the fraudulent scheme (working on the site under the nickname "CumbaJohnny"), he was not charged.

According to the indictment, 4,000 people registered on shadowcrew.com. After registration, they could buy stolen account numbers or fake documents at auction or read textbooks and how-tos that describe the use of cryptography in magnetic stripes of credit cards, debit cards, and bank cards so that their numbers can be used.

Site moderators punished members who did not comply with the rules of the site, as well as returned the money if the stolen card numbers were invalid.

In addition to card numbers, many other identity theft items were sold at auction, including fake passports, driver's licenses, social security cards, credit cards, debit cards, birth certificates, college student IDs and health insurance cards.

One participant sold 18 million email accounts with corresponding usernames, passwords, dates of birth, and other personal information. Most of the defendants were participants who actually sold illegal items. Users who kept or moderated the site were accused in absentia, including those who tried to register the domain name Shadowcrew.cc

The secret service dubbed its investigation “Operation Firewall” and believed that by that time $ 4.3 million had been stolen. Shadowcrew shared its information with other groups: Carderplanet and Darkprofits.

Investigations were carried out by units from the USA, Bulgaria, Belarus, Canada, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Gonzalez was initially charged with possessing 15 fake credit and debit cards in Newark, New Jersey, although he escaped jail time by providing evidence for the United States secret service against his accomplices. 19 members of ShadowCrew were charged. Gonzalez then returned to Miami.

TJX Companies

Cooperating with the authorities, he said that he was planning to hack TJX companies , which in 2007 in 18 months stole 45.6 million credit and debit cards. In 2005, 40 million entries in CardSystems Solutions were hacked. Gonzalez, with ten accomplices, was looking for vulnerabilities in wireless networks along Route 1 in Miami. They cracked cards at BJ's Wholesale Club, DSW, Office Max, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority and TJ Maxx.

Prosecutors Gonzalez called him by nicknames: "cumbajohny", "soupnazi", "segvec", "kingchilli" and "stanozlolz."

Hacking was a hardship for TJ Maxx, who discovered hacking in December 2006. The company initially believed that the hacking began in May 2006, but further investigation revealed that everything began in July 2005.

One of Gonzalez’s alleged accomplices, Stephen Watt, was 7 feet tall, and is known in the hacker world as “Unix Terrorist” and “Jim Jones.” Watt worked at Morgan Stanley in New York and wrote an interceptor program.

Arrest

Gonzalez was arrested on May 7, 2008 on charges of hacking into the Dave & Buster corporate network in Islandia, New York. The incident occurred in September 2007, when about 5,000 card numbers were stolen. Fraudulent transactions totaling $ 600,000 were recorded on 675 cards.

The authorities began to suspect something after the conspirators continued to return to the restaurant to hack the network again to restart the attack, as it does not restart if the computers were turned off.

Gonzalez was arrested at room 1508 at the National Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. In related arrests, authorities seized $ 1.6 million in cash (including $ 1.1 million in plastic bags in a drum buried in his parents' backyard), his laptops and a Glock pistol.

Officials said Gonzalez lived in a modest house in Miami.

He was in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center when he was charged with assaulting Heartland.

Accomplices

In the same case with Gonzalez, there were several more people from the United States. They were accused and convicted as follows:


Stephen Watt was charged with providing a data theft tool in case of identity theft. Stephen Watt was sentenced to two years in prison and three years under the supervision of the authorities. By order of the court, he was also required to pay $ 171.5 million restitution.
Read more: Caught in the System, Ex-Hacker Is Stalked by His Past


Damon Patrick Toey pleaded guilty to fraud, credit card fraud and identity theft with aggravating circumstances and received five years in prison.
Read more: Coder Journeys From Wall Street to Prison


Christopher Scott pleaded guilty to conspiracy, unauthorized access to computer systems, fraud with access devices and theft of personal data. He was sentenced to seven years.
Read more: TJX Accomplice Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison

Heartland Payment Systems

In August 2009, Gonzalez was accused in Newark, New Jersey in the case of the burglary Heartland Payment Systems , Citibank ATMs 7-Eleven and computer systems Hannaford Brothers . Heartland took over the main part of the attack, in which 130 million card numbers were stolen. 4.6 million numbers were stolen from Hannaford. Two other retailers were not disclosed in the indictment. However, attorney Gonzalez told StorefrontBacktalk that two of the retailers were JC Penney and Target Corporation. Heartland reported that as a result of the attack, including attorney fees, it lost $ 12.6 million. Gonzalez allegedly called Operation Get Rich Or Die Tryin.

According to the indictment, the attack by González and two unknown hackers “in or near Russia” together with the conspirator PT from Miami began on December 26, 2007 at Heartland Payment Systems, in August 2007 at 7-Eleven, and Hannaford Brothers in November 2007 year, as well as two other unidentified companies. Gonzalez and his associates aimed at large companies and studied their terminals, and then made an attack from Internet-connected computers in New Jersey, Illinois, the Netherlands, and Ukraine.

They carried out their attacks via the Internet, using many nicknames in chat rooms, stored data related to their attacks on several hacker platforms, disconnected programs that recorded incoming and outgoing traffic and were disguised through the use of "proxies".

The indictment states that hackers checked their program on 20 anti-virus programs.

Rene Palomino Jr., an attorney for Gonzalez, is accused of blogging on the New York Times website that the indictment grew out of squabbles between US prosecutors in New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Palomino noted that Gonzalez was in negotiations with New York and Massachusetts about the plea deal in connection with the TJ Maxx case, when New Jersey announced his conviction. Palomino revealed the PT plotter as Damon Patrick Toey, who pleaded guilty in the case of TJ Maxx. Palomino said that Toey, not Gonzalez, was the leader of the Heartland case. Palomino also said: “Mr. Toey has been working with us since day one. He stayed in Gonzalez’s apartment. This whole idea of ​​creation belonged to Toey ... It was his brainchild. Not Albert Gonzalez. I know that he did not participate in all the chains that were hacked from New Jersey. ”

Palomino said that one of the unnamed Russian hackers in the Heartland case was Maxim “Maksik” Yastremsky , who was also charged with TJ Maxx, but is currently serving 30 years in a Turkish prison on charges of hacking Turkish banks, in an affiliate with Gonzalez. According to investigators, Yastremsky and Gonzalez exchanged 600 messages, and that Gonzalez paid him $ 400,000 through e-gold.


Yastremsky was detained in July 2007 in Turkey on charges of breaking into 12 banks in Turkey. The Secret Service investigation was used to formulate the case against Gonzalez, including the secret viewing of the Yastremskiy laptop in Dubai in 2006 and a review of the disk image of the Latvian computer leased from Cronos IT and allegedly used in the attack.

After being charged, Hearland stated that they did not have information about how many credit card numbers had been stolen, and did not have information about how the US government reached the figure of 130 million numbers.

Deal with the authorities

On August 28, 2009, Gonzalez's lawyer filed documents with the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston indicating that Gonzalez pleaded guilty to all 19 US charges in Albert Gonzalez, 08-CR-10223 (TJ Maxx case). This plea bargain is said to "solve" problems with a case in New York USA against Yastremskiy, 08-CR-00160 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (the Dave and Busters case).

On March 25, 2010, US district judge Patti Saris sentenced Gonzalez to 20 years in prison for breaking and stealing information from TJX, Office Max, Dave and Busters, Barnes & Noble restaurants and a number of other companies. The next day, the district judge Douglas P. Woodlock sentenced him to 20 years in a case involving Heartland payment systems. Sentences were to be executed simultaneously, which means that Gonzalez will serve a sentence of a total of 20 years for both cases. The verdict included the confiscation of property: cash ($ 1.65 million), condominium in Miami, blue 2006 BMW 330i, IBM and Toshiba computers, Glock 27 pistol, Nokia phone, Tiffany diamond ring and three hours of Rolex.

On March 25, 2011, Gonzalez filed a pardon petition with the US District Court in Boston. He argued that during the time when he committed his crimes, he provided assistance to the United States Secret Service to search for international cybercriminals and stated that his lawyers could not tell him that he could thus use the protection of "state." body ". The Secret Service declined to comment on Gonzalez’s petition, which is still pending.

Gonzalez is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth. The term of imprisonment of Gonzalez expires in 2025.

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