Mysterious Malware Infects Cash Registers Around Globe
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CREDIT: Bogus credit card charges image via Shutterstock |
A new version of credit-card data-stealing malware has been discovered on point-of-sale machines in 40 different countries.
The "Dexter" malware, as it's called, is on card-reading PIN-pad machines at a variety of businesses, including hotels, restaurants and retail stores, Aviv Raff, chief technology officer of Israeli security firm Seculert wrote in a report. Thirty percent of the infections have been discovered in the U.S. with the second-largest concentrations occurring in the U.K. at 19 percent and in Canada at 9 percent.
Once on board, Dexter copies a computer's files to a remote server in the Republic of Seychelles, Tech site Ars Technica reported. From there, it's reasonable to believe that criminals are using the information to create clones of the cards.
"Instead of going through the trouble of infecting tens of thousands of PCs or physically installing a skimmer, an attacker can achieve the same results by targeting just a few POS systems," Raff wrote.
Named from a string of text inside of itself, Dexter's method of infection remains a mystery. It's unlikely that POS machines would become infected via drive-by download, phishing scam or something similar as those devices are not used to surf the Web.
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