McAfee warns of malware targeting point-of-sale systems

March 24, 2013

A new piece of custom malware sold on the underground Internet market is being used to siphon payment card data from point-of-sale (POS) systems, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor McAfee. Dubbed vSkimmer, the Trojan-like malware is designed to infect Windows-based computers that have payment card readers attached to them, McAfee security researcher Chintan Shah said last week in a blog post. The malware was first detected by McAfee's sensor network on February 13 and is currently being advertised on cybercriminal forums as being better than Dexter, a different POS malware program that was discovered back in December. Once installed on a computer, vSkimmer gathers information about the OS, including its version, unique GUID identifier, default language, hostname, and active username. This information is sent back to the control and command server in encoded format as part of all HTTP requests and is used by the attackers to keep track of individually infected machines. The malware waits for the server to respond with a "dlx" (download and execute) or "upd" (update) command. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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