Hacker's high life ends in jail

Today, Albert Gonzalez, the most prolific commercial hacker in history, is beginning a 20-year jail sentence.

Thus comes to an end a saga of crime, greed and deft keyboard work that brought him a life high on the hog with a supercar and condo, his lady friends some fancy jewellery, and much grief to the millions of people whose credit card details he plundered.

No one - least of all Gonzalez - knows how many card-holders were affected, but the most cautious estimates put the total in the tens of millions.

Gonzalez, as these numbers suggest, was no amateur. He was young - still only 28 - but so good at penetrating supposedly secure networks that at one time he was hired by United States intelligence to trace other hackers.

His obsession with computers began in childhood: while still in a Florida high school he was questioned by the FBI after breaking into an Indian government website.

In 2003, Gonzalez (whose father came to the US from Cuba on a homemade raft in the 1970s) was arrested for hacking. He was not charged and agreed to become a government informant.

Yet even while he was performing this public service, he was penetrating the networks of major companies and stealing credit card details.

Using the aliases "segvec", "soupnazi", and "j4juar17", he led a group of professional identity thieves in the US, Ukraine and Russia who made money by selling card data on the black market and taking bundles of money out of cash machines.

One of his team's principal techniques was "wardriving", in which he and two partners would cruise in a car past shops, and use a laptop to detect stores with vulnerable wireless internet signals. The trio would then install "sniffer programmes" to hoover up details of the cards and their owners and sell them on. By 2008, Gonzalez had 40 million credit card details on his servers.

His share of the proceeds was an estimated US$2.8 million, which he used to buy an apartment in Miami, a BMW, Rolex watches for his father and friends, a Tiffany ring for a girlfriend, and to stage a US$75,000 birthday party. At one time he was rather put out when his money-counter malfunctioned and he had to count out US$340,000 in US$20 notes by hand. Such a chore.

His run came to an end in May 2008, when police raided the room in the lavish Miami hotel where Gonzalez was staying. Among his possessions were US$22,000 in cash and a Glock 9mm handgun.

Later, about US$1.1 million was found buried in his parents' Florida back garden. He pleaded guilty in trials late last year and was sentenced at hearings on Friday and Saturday. Gonzalez's defence team claimed he showed behaviour consistent with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, but the courts in Florida and Boston still gave him two concurrent 20-year terms.

- INDEPENDENT