Albert Gonzalez
termsecurityhacking
The Miami carder who stole roughly 170 million payment-card numbers between 2005 and 2007 - TJX, Heartland Payment Systems, Dave and Buster's and others - while working as a paid informant for the US Secret Service.
The technique was mundane and therefore damning: war driving to find shops running weak wireless encryption, then SQL injection against payment processors. The scale rewrote the rules - it is a direct cause of the PCI DSS regime's teeth, of end-to-end encryption in payment terminals, and of the modern assumption that card data must never sit readable on a retailer's network. He is serving twenty years, the longest sentence yet handed down in the United States for computer crime.
Also known as: soupnazi, operation get rich or die tryin, tjx breach, heartland breach