Albert Gonzales, who used a custom data theft trojan to steal 96 million credit and debit card numbers from retailer TJ Maxx (including daughter companies HomeGoods and Marshalls), has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. Gonzales still faces sentencing for his role in the data theft leveraged at Heartland Payment Systems, 7-11 and other companies.
While carrying out his crimes, Gonzales was receiving a $75,000 annual salary as a paid informant for the U.S. Secret Service. In both the TJ Maxx and Heartland Payment Systems heists, the presence of the data theft trojans went unnoticed for considerable periods of time, prolonging the exposure and increasing the damage done.
According to Terence Spies, Chief Technology Officer at Voltage Security, "The payments industry is working hard to implement new technologies that remove credit card data from networks and databases, either by encrypting it or by storing proxy tokens. These techniques give an attacker that breaks into a merchant or processor environment nothing but useless random numbers."
Spies cautions, "Rolling these technologies out will not be trivial by any means, but technology suppliers, merchants, processors, and standards groups are all working together to make these systems strong and cost efficient to implement."
Voltage participates in several of these initiatives. According to Voltage, several payment processors, including Heartland Payment Systems, have already adopted systems like this that
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