The US Department of Justice has charged Albert Gonzalez for his part in a massive operation hacking identity theft. Perhaps you know it by its other names: segvec, j4guar17 or soupnazi, but you probably do not. However, chances are you have used at least one of the companies that Gonzalez hacked, preferred supplier to the Slurpees America and beef jerky: 7-Eleven. Using what the Department of Justice calls "a sophisticated hacking technique called an" SQL injection attack, "Gonzalez managed to bypass the network firewall and recover over 130 million credit and Heartland debit cards Payment Systems, Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain, and aforementioned chain convenience stores.
According to the Ministry of Justice:
"Gonzalez and his co-conspirators credit card systems research and speed used by their victims; developed a sophisticated attack to penetrate their networks and steal credit card data and flow and then sent the data to computer servers they operated in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. "
As consumers, we expect that credit card transactions should be secure enough. We hope all our payment data is locked in a house secure vault, never to be seen by criminals eyes. We expect that these companies use the best security systems available. And maybe they do. Unfortunately, with the pirates, it is the race of arms. Where there is a gap, they will operate.
Although the security of the corporate network is beyond the control of consumers everyday, individuals can protect themselves with protection against identity theft and monitoring of the credit report. This way, even if your data is hacked, there is a better chance that you can control the damage.