Significant number of major businesses hit by Backoff malware

After my last post, a  new article came out about the Backoff malware.  The article, quoting the US Department of Homeland Security, said that over a thousand small, medium and enterprise U.S. businesses have been compromised by the Backoff malware package.

Backoff is fairly new – first seen last year – and scrapes the memory of POS systems.  7 POS vendors have confirmed that they have multiple clients affected.  The Secret Service is involved.  It is believed that this malware is responsible for the breaches at Target, SuperValu and UPS.

The attackers break into the POS systems using a variety of techniques and then install the malware on the system.  Once the malware is installed, every transaction on the system from that point forward will be compromised.

MItch Tanenbaum

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