How Do You Steal 130 Million Credit Card Numbers? |
| Atlantic Online - Aug 18, 2009 |
A Miami man and two Russian accomplices are being indicted for allegedly stealing 130 million credit card numbers, the largest identity theft in history. That's a lot of credit card numbers -- like, one for every housing unit in the United States. How did they do it?
The historic theft involved five corporate data hackings, between 2006 and 2008, including Heartland, Hannaford, 7-Eleven and two unnamed companies, according to Channel Web. US investigators say the team scanned lists of Fortune 500 companies and learned about their checkout counter machines (also known as point-of-sale systems). Then they would write specific codes to corrupt their data systems and launch a virus from computers in the United States and Europe to pull hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers, and sort through them using a "sniffer," which is basically a data analysis system that decodes big chunks of information.
Read Full Article from Atlantic Online
- Posted: 2009-08-18 10:57:36
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