Skip to main content

Gonzalez, Toey - Ringleaders?

By
It appears that there are a number of sources that are questioning the indictment of Gonzalez as a ring-leader such as the NY Times. I agree that Gonzalez is wrongly accused as the “ring-leader” of the operation - but for different reasons.

1. Gonzalez is likely just a low level carder (one who gathers and sells credit and debit card information), and one that was once on the secret service payroll to infiltrate the carder network. No different than other junkies that break into cars to steal ID information for drug money, but he just happened to use a more efficient method. SQL injection and wifi-sniffing are not very sophisticated attacks - nor was Albert’s MO - including leading a very lavish and noisy personal life. He used ICQ to chat with other affiliates and didn’t try to hard to protect information related to his wrong-doings.


2. The eastern European individuals named in the indictment appear to be MUCH more sophisticated as they organize the processes of converting the stolen information into cash. These guys are likely to be the real ring-leaders of the operation as they take the largest share of the profits. They normally operate out of non-extradition countries where they are permitted to operate as they wish. They still do slip up from time to time though as you can see with Maksym Yastremski sitting in Turkish Prison.

3. Even Gonzalez lawyer charges that Damon Toey was more of a ring-leader than Albert - but in reality both of these guys are simply carders - good ones, but carders nonetheless, both fencing card information to the European guys overseas for a small piece of the action.

It is my opinion that the US Attorney’s offices should describe these truths an these guys involvement in the scheme rather than try to make it falsely appear to the public that they’ve caught the “ring-leaders”. The should equally provide public information on how the whole scheme works. Wikipedia has some decent information for the uninformed, but doesn't get into how the organized portion of the fraud scheme really works. The RCMP even have a page for information, but again it just touches on the subject.

Maybe someone can post a link to a better explanation of the entire scheme.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-virus Statistics - Motivations

By
In a study completed and published by Avira ( http://www.avira.com/en/company_news/recognition_performance_virus_protection.html ) The results of the survey showed that for 34 percent (3,207 respondents) a long-established, trustworthy brand was key. Almost as many users, 33 percent (3,077 respondents), based their decision on the virus detection rates achieved in independent tests. Detection rates - lets call this effectiveness of the control - as this is the key metric used to measure effectiveness. This is a skewed metric as for the large majority of evaluations (ICSALabs, VB100, etc) use the "in-the-wild" or ITW list of viruses to perform the evaluations. There is no evaluation of these product's ability to respond or even detect newly released virus and malware. In all honesty really what we are dealing with here is preventative vulnerability management not virus detection and correction, and in my opinion there are four types of preventative protections required f
Post a Comment
Read more

Local Classified Penny Auction Scam

By
While there are a lot of new posts regarding the new ways to exploit people using novel techniques and 0day exploits, there continues to be a rash of tried and true methods of coercion.  I want to just walk through a simple example and reflect on how effective these methods continue to be. Many people turn toward online classified sites to buy and sell items online.  This example starts with kijiji.ca which even I've used on occasion to find used electronics and other items.  Doing a search on the site for a " Samsung Galaxy Note 2 " returns a posting from today with someone selling one for an unreasonably priced unit. $125 for a $500 phone?, but what if it's for real?  No harm in just asking some simple questions.  Email sent with some obvious questions regarding the condition and location. About an hour passes before I get a response from what appears to be a legit seller. Notice no answer to the questions I asked, but a friendly pointer at where th
14 comments
Read more

OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX - Creative Storage - Part II

By
In part I of this post, I looked at the simple steps required to setup a relatively simple storage solution using OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX. This was about a month ago, and I've made some significant changes on how this is used for me. At the end of the last post I left off on the part dealing with configuration of the iSCSI initiator side of the solution. I stopped here because there were some issues related to the installation and use of the software. The iSCSI initiator that I was using was Studio Network Solutions GlobalSAN initiator (version 3.3.0.43) which is used to allow for connections to their products. This software will also allow for connections to ANY iSCSI target! After the configuration of the iSCSI target on the ZFS pool, and installation of the client it was trivial to get the connection established with the storage pool, and it showed up in OSX as a raw disk which had not been formatted. I proceeded to format the disk as HFS+ and it then mounted as a lo
1 comment
Read more