First of all,
What is POS breach?
POS stands for point-of-sale. It is an attack where the criminal steals the 16 digit credit card number of customers. Once these have been stolen, they are sold for some pennies per piece. This information can be used for fake credit cards.
Attackers mostly target small or medium-sized business for committing POS breach because these are less secure.
It is a multi-stage process:
-
- Gain access to the targeted network
- By finding weak points of the network
Or - By forwarding a malicious link to anyone in the firm so that his computer may get infected.
- By finding weak points of the network
- Then, install malware to send the stolen data of retailer to the hacker.
- Gain access to the targeted network
An example of such kind of POS malware is BlackPOS; it is widely used by attackers to earn millions. This software steals the card details and these get stored in the terminal’s memory while it is being swiped. This technique is called as memory scrapping; a data capturing method.
Now the question arises, how to secure yourself from such malicious activity?
Below are some of the ways to protect yourself:
-
-
- Install the apps from where you can make your payments online without the need of credit card or get online access to your credit card account.
- Always keep checking your card activity like any sort of transactions that have not made by you or unnecessary deductions from your account. If found such activities, then do complain about it to your credit card company so that your account gets frozen to avoid further transactions.
- Closely monitor all your financial accounts whether personal or commercial purposes.
- Your address, PIN codes, PAN cards, Date of birth, account number or any other personal data must be secured enough as otherwise; it may lead to identity theft.
-
So, in order to protect yourself from POS attack, keep a vigil eye over your credit card activities daily if you use credit cards for each and every type of bill payments. Stay alert and active. If detects any fraudulent activity, bring in the notice to the respected firm and ensure to get your money back.
There are some softwares like Norton, which help to secure your credit card details while it is on the computer.
For more great content like this, subscribe to our monthly newsletter:
[newsletter]