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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 09 2019, @10:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-does-POS-stand-for-again? dept.

Hackers caused havoc at four restaurant chains in the U.S. over the summer after compromising their payment systems with malware that stole customers' payment card information.

In the last two days, McAlister's Deli, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Schlotzsky’s, and Hy-Vee disclosed publicly that their networks were infected with point-of-sale malware copying data from cards used in person at certain locations.

McAlister's, Moe's, and Schlotzsky’s together have around 1,500 locations spread across the U.S. and are owned by the same parent company, Focus Brands.

Hy-Vee operates in the retail (fuel pumps, grocery, convenience, drug stores) business and it is employee-owned. It has over 245 locations in the U.S. that registered $10 billion in revenue last year.

Yesterday, the three Focus Brands subsidiaries provided details about a payment card security incident affecting corporate and franchised restaurants (1, 2, 3). The intrusion was ended on July 22 for all three chains although it had started at different dates.

At Moe’s and McAlister’s, the attackers scraped the information beginning April 29 while at Schlotzsky’s the operation began earlier, on April 11.

"The unauthorized code was not present at all locations, and at most locations it was present for only a few weeks in July," reads the notification from the three chains.

[...] It appears that malware was used on PoS devices "at certain Hy-Vee fuel pumps, drive-thru coffee shops, and restaurants."

Unlike the compromise at Focus Brands subsidiaries where the malware resided for about a month on the systems, the duration of the malicious activity at Hy-Vee was much longer.

For fuel pumps, it began on December 14, 2018, while for restaurants and drive-thru coffee shops the malware had been active since January 15, the update informs.

In six locations, though, there are suspicions that the start date for sweeping the card data was November 9, 2018. Furthermore, in one location access to the payment information may have lasted until August 2.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 09 2019, @11:58AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday October 09 2019, @11:58AM (#904652)

    But, we did just have to do another "refresh" of our CCN... charges from some arena in LA for $966 and some other miscellaneous activity showed up out of nowhere. Seems like the frequency has been increasing - about a year since the last one, about 2 years before that, and in the distant past it was closer to 5 years between CCN breaches.

    Way back in the '90s I had a spurious charge appear from Russia and the fraud department at the CCN just reversed the charge and didn't make me get a new card - that was a weird one, every other time it's a new card, update all the auto-pays, stress about whether the upcoming travel will have a problem with the backup card...

    As far as fast food skimmers go, it doesn't surprise me that the hit isn't coming from the employees - video cameras over their shoulders, etc. seem to keep them pretty straight, if somewhat unhappy about being constantly monitored.

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:12PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 09 2019, @12:12PM (#904663) Homepage Journal

    So why do we get to enter our passcodes on the store-provided machine, instead of on our cards, so the card could do the necessary crypto handshaking?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:07PM (#904710)

      There are two possibilities, we live in early 70's and there is no such hardware or if it we did crypto on card then we couldn't steal all money from political enemies and pretend this was done by random thief and this type of crime would be too rare to make jerbs in analysing financial transactions of billions of peop^H^H^Hpotential terrorists and money launderers.

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