Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When Albert Gonzalez officially pleaded guilty to many of the federal cyberthief charges against him on Friday (Sept. 11), the government shed a little more light on the case, such as that it was BJ's Wholesale Club that was first attacked and that the Secret Service has collected "more than forty million distinct credit and debit card numbers from two computer servers" controlled by Gonzalez and his associates and has counted the consumer, retail and bank victims as "an enormous number of people, certainly millions upon millions, perhaps tens of millions."

In Friday's hearing, the government for the first time put a number next to the DSW breach, saying that the $1.5 billion apparel chain operating 300 stores in 37 states (in addition to supplying footwear to 367 leased locations) lost more than one million card numbers in the breach. The government also said that OfficeMax—the $8.3 billion office supplies chain with 939 stores in the United States and 83 in Mexico—played a crucial role, with Assistant Boston U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann saying that OfficeMax's "then vulnerable encryption of PINs enabled Gonzalez (and a colleague) to sell the conspirators' bounty for particularly large profits." The only new data morsel about TJX to emerge was a Heymann estimate that TJX alone "suffered close to $200 million in losses and associated expenses."

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