TJX Hacker Sentenced to 20 Years

As reported by Help Net Security, and Wired magazine, the infamous TJX Hacker (Albert Gonzales) has been sentenced to a record 20 years in prison for stealing, with his accomplices, over 90 million unsuspecting users credit card details.

This highlights two key things to take away from the story:

1. Online data and identity theft is not just a serious threat, but that it has also gravitated away from being a small-scale “person in a room” approach to being a serious criminal enterprise.
2. Users really need to take identity theft, and therefore protection of their systems seriously.

The story highlights just how much criminal gangs can take from this kind of online “data capture”, and the large sums of money involved.

SPAMfighter recommends at the very least antivirus and anti-spam protection to counter these types of threat. However, software is never enough, users must take a stronger more proactive role in keeping themselves safe online. Our previous blog post on doing so can be found here.