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A hacker who once worked for the Department of Defense and other government agencies pleaded guilty yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania to two counts of wire fraud related to the theft of data from 1.8 million credit cards. Max Ray Vision, 36, also known by his former legal name Max Ray Butler and by several online aliases, stole and sold data from credit card accounts, resulting in $86 million worth of fraudulent purchases in the United States and abroad during a period of at least 16 months in 2006 and 2007, according to prosecutors. Authorities arrested Vision in a San Francisco apartment in September 2007. Vision's plea agreement is confidential, and several documents spanning the nearly two-year case remain sealed from public view, due to ongoing investigations. But in a criminal complaint prosecutors filed against Vision, FBI agents said Butler had hacked into the Pentagon Federal Credit Union, Citibank and a government employee's computer, and he gained full profiles and personal identification numbers of accountholders. Butler, as he was legally known at the time he worked for the Department of Defense, was convicted in 2001 for having installed "backdoor" codes that enabled him to hack into government systems at the Defense Department, the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA and the U.S. Air Force. Vision became a government informant upon being paroled from prison but returned to crime by administering CardersMarket.com, an online marketplace for stolen financial data. Sentencing is set for Oct. 20.
