A new malware that steals credit card information has infected over 700 retail outlets and could result in a fresh around of skimming if issues are not addressed by banks and merchants.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), which operates under the auspices of the department of information technology under the ministry of IT and Communications, has warned of the new virus which has been identified as BrutPoS.
“It has been reported that malware variants targeting point-of-sale (POS) systems, dubbed “BrutPOS”, is spreading. BrutPOS mainly targets Windows-based system by leveraging web as the main infection vector apart from being downloaded by other malware families,” CERT said in an advisory.
Nitin Bhatnagar, head of business development at SISA Information Security, a firm that certifies the level of security in payment systems, said, “BrutPOS malware identifies the system that has weak username/passwords and tries to exploit them. These username-passwords combinations are typically defaulting like admin-admin or admin-password.”
“Although we can get an idea of the number of devices that are infected, we cannot identify the devices themselves. The malware is designed in such a manner that it does not have a label and is named identical to some of the Windows system files,” said Bhatnagar. He said this malware impacts only those POS devices that are based on internet protocol. The card machines that connect through phone lines won’t be an issue.
Banks recently embarked on a drive to replace old magnetic strip cards with new high security chip cards. One of the reasons for the large scale reissuance of cards before the expiry date was to counter high level of frauds on account of skimming.
