A new malware program designed to steal payment card details from point-of-sale (PoS) systems is targeting businesses using Oracle Micros products.
Micros, which was acquired by Oracle last year, develops front and back office customer service systems that are popular in the hospitality, food and retail industries. Its technology is used at over 330,000 customer sites in 180 countries, according to the company.
Security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro recently came across a highly configurable memory scraping malware program that they dubbed MalumPoS.
This kind of program monitors the memory of other processes for payment card track data—the information that’s encoded on the magnetic stripe of payment cards and which can be used to clone them.
The MalumPoS samples identified by Trend Micro look for such data in the memory of processes associated with Oracle Micros technology, a transaction gateway application from Shift4, Web-based PoS systems accessed through Internet Explorer and Oracle Forms, a tool for accessing data in Oracle databases.
“Looking at the user base of these listed platforms, we can see that a major chunk is from the U.S.,” the Trend Micro researchers said Friday in a blog post.
When it infects a system, MalumPoS installs itself as a service called Nvidia Display Driv3r. It then uses regular expressions to detect track data for Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and Diner’s Club cards.
The malware is configurable and can technically monitor up to 100 different processes at the same time, the Trend Micro researchers said. So, in the future, attackers might add other PoS systems and applications that handle card data to its target list, they said.
The number of memory scraping PoS malware programs have increased over the past several years and they appear to be the weapon of choice for cybercriminals looking to steal payment card data. Such programs played a big role in some of the largest card breaches to date, including those at Target and Home Depot.
There are multiple ways in which PoS terminals get infected with this kind of malware, the most common one being through weak remote access credentials. That’s because these systems are often configured to receive remote technical support, sometimes through insecure technology.
In other cases attackers first compromise other computers on the same internal network where the PoS terminals are located and then use stolen administrative credentials or exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities to install malware on them.