Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Cyberthief Extraordinaire Albert Gonzalez’s crew targeted at least one of the retail chain victims they hit partially because they didn’t like the chain. Forever 21 was targeted because “the clothes were poorly made and the employees were poorly paid,” Gonzalez Co-Conspirator Patrick Toey is quoted as saying in a profile of Gonzalez by The New York Times Magazine. In the Times piece, Toey described how the Forever 21 attack began with a flaw in the chain’s shopping cart software.

He also spoke about some of the other many retail victims of the Gonzalez crew. Another member of the gang walked into an Office Max near Los Angeles and simply “loosened a terminal at a checkout counter and walked out of the store with it” for intelligence gathering. Once in, Toey said, the system was foolproof: “Every time a card was swiped, it would be logged into our file. There was nothing anyone could do about it.” More intriguingly, Toey said the crew had attacked “major chains and [orchestrated] big hacks that would dwarf TJX,” none of which were ever the subject of the federal probe. “I’m just waiting for them to indict us for the rest of them,” he said. So, the saga isn’t over yet. As if it we didn’t already suspect that.