Ensilo Blog Think Your Point of Sale Devices Are Secure in Time for the Holidays? Think Again!

Retailers, restaurants, hoteliers, and small businesses continue to discover breaches on their point of sale (POS) devices, as the result of brute force hacking, backdoor malware, use of stolen credentials, phishing, or memory scraping. Even though retailers have a responsibility to protect consumer data, attacks still happen. According to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, while some attacks are specific actions taken against specific assets, “others show that some actions are conducted earlier or later in event chains that feature a particular asset – you don’t phish a laptop, but you may phish a human and install malware on his/her laptop in the next step. In brief, the game has not changed for this industry. POS Controllers are compromised and malware specifically designed to capture payment card data in memory is installed and extended to connected POS Terminals.”