The largest identity theft scam in US history

If you can't trust a government employee, who can you trust?

Not Albert Gonzalez apparently, as the 28 year old Miami resident has been charged with with the largest identity theft scam in the US history.

Gonzalez was an informer for the US Secret Service during which time he helped them catch hackers, but was later discovered to be passing information to the criminals about ongoing investigations. His latest scheme has seen stealing details of as many as 130 million credit and debit cards accounts from big retail companies and selling them on.

Big. Retail. Companies.

It's the main thing that makes the whole incident that more scary, as when we hand over our details to big retailers we expect a certain level of security and professionalism that we wouldn't get from Honest Ron's Cheap Meat Consortium.

According to reports, Gonzalez, working with two anonymous Russian accomplices, breached the databases of some of the country's biggest retail chains in order to sell the stolen information across the world.

Stores that you'd expect to have sophisticated security such as 7-Eleven were hacked from their New Jersey offices and customer card details were stolen.

Gonzalez, along with his partners, used sophisticated techniques to keep away from detection, such as connecting to firms' computers using proxy servers, testing around 20 distinct anti-virus applications to check out whether their malware might be caught, as well as employing malware that tried to remove signs of its presence.

You'd really have expected the US Secret Service to pick their informants better, wouldn't you?

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