New malware program PoSeidon targets point-of-sale systems

Retailers beware: A new Trojan program targets point-of-sale (PoS) terminals, stealing payment card data that can then be abused by cybercriminals.

The new malware program has been dubbed PoSeidon by researchers from Cisco’s Security Solutions (CSS) team and, like most point-of-sale Trojans, it scans the RAM of infected terminals for unencrypted strings that match credit card information—a technique known as memory scraping.

This sensitive information is available in plain text in the memory of a PoS system while it’s being processed by the specialized merchant software running on the terminal.

Security experts have long called for the use of end-to-end encryption technology to protect payment card data from the card reader all the way to the payment service provider, but the number of systems with this capability remains low.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here