This past Monday the U.S. Justice Department charged 28 year-old Albert Gonzalez with a series of crimes that resulted in the theft of more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers from late 2006 to early 2008.

The indictment places blame for several high-profile data theft incidents on a small group of individuals who found holes in websites used to transfer the credit card data. Basically, these folks have to be the best hackers out there if they were behind every high profile data breach of the past two years.

In the latest episode of eIQcast, Security and Compliance Evangelist John Linkous reviews the charges, talks about how retailers and consumers can protect themselves, and notes how the crime was carried out by exploiting a well-known (and extremely easy to replicate) web site security weakness.