Florida USA - The USA Justice Department indicted a Florida man for stealing 8+ gigabytes of personal identifying information. This could be the largest identity theft case ever.

A 144 count indictment was slapped on Scott Levine of Florida for allegedly stealing personal information from the computers of Acxiom Corporation. Acxiom is an information clearinghouse for many of the Fortune 500 and major credit card companies.

Levine is accused of stealing vast amounts of personal information from the company via the Internet. At this time, it is unclear whether Levine had previous legal access to the information. An estimated 8.2 gigabytes of information was stolen.

Levine apparently used the information to spam people through a company called Snipermail. Interestingly enough, Snipermail is being investigated for a previous break-in into Acxiom’s computer systems.

Computer Forensic investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Secret Service worked together in tracking down the source of the theft. Apparently entry was made through an Internet accessible FTP site, you probably guessed it ftp.acxiom.com .

Authorities say that Acxiom is cooperating with the investigation. One has to wonder why Mr. Levine was caught after transferring 8.2 gigabytes of information via the Internet. If he was downloading at DSL speeds (lets say 100kiloBytes/sec), it would have taken almost 23 hours to transfer that much data.

You can Read the DOJ Press Release