This article, which ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago, is absolutely fascinating; it’s about Albert Gonzalez, the man who was behind the credit card hacking at TJMaxx and many others (for those of you who’ve taken 206 – this is the FTC settlement case that we read about). Apparently, while he’s not a strong programmer, he’s absolutely brilliant at figuring out ways to hack into systems. He was recruited to help the US Justice Department catch hackers, but was double-crossing them at the time.
A detail that I found especially pertinent were the descriptions of his leadership skills, which I found amusing because we’ve talked about the skills that managers need to lead companies. But criminals need management skills as well, and they encounter just as many problems with information management; something to keep in mind…
From the article: Indeed, no one I spoke with compared him to a gangster or a mercenary — preferred honorifics among hackers — but several likened him to a brilliant executive. “In the U.S., we have two kinds of powerful, successful business leaders. We have people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are the most sophisticated of electronic technicians and programmers,” says Steve Heymann, the Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney who, in the spring of 2010, secured a combined 38 years of prison time for Gonzalez and his co-conspirators for their corporate breaches. “Then we have others, like the C.E.O.’s of AT&T or General Electric, who are extremely good in their area but also know when to go to others for expertise and how to build powerful organizations by using those others. Gonzalez fits into that second category.”
An assistant US Attorney describes Gonzalez this way: “As a leader? Unparalleled. Unparalleled in his ability to coordinate contacts and continents and expertise. Unparalleled in that he didn’t just get a hack done — he got a hack done, he got the exfiltration of the data done, he got the laundering of the funds done. He was a five-tool player.”