Malware Hacks into Home Depot Card Data

According to recent reports, the Atlanta, Georgia, USA headquartered American retailer Home Depot had its systems containing customer card data targeted with the same malicious program, which attacked the point-of-sale devices of the North America based well-known retailer Target, earlier during the holidays, published scmagazine.com dated September 8, 2014.

It was the 7th of September 2014 when Brian Krebs the security journalist disclosed the matter while stating that one fresh sample of BlackPOS, the malicious program under discussion, was utilized for the Home Depot hack. Scmagazine.com published this.

Krebs is behind exposing both the Target incident of 2013 December and the Home Depot hack recently in September 2014 and has been tracking the two closely.

Referring to one source in contact with the investigation of the Home Depot incident, the security expert stated that the latest BlackPOS variant having another name "KAPTOXA," contaminated a few, if not all, store registers of Home Depot.

Krebs also discovered sale of the stolen card data on the underground forum Rescator.cc the same place that had sale of millions of payment cards compromised from Target's database.

He highlighted that reports about Home Depot affected with BlackPOS emerged soon following Trend Micro's thorough information about one fresh strain of the threat during the near-end of August 2014. Trend Micro the anti-virus firm based in Tokyo named that strain TSPY_MEMLOG.A, which camouflaged one particular anti-virus program, thus minimizing its detection possibilities by any retail security group. Although, the security company didn't detect the spoofed anti-virus program's name, it stated that the strain was capable of destabilizing the original AV.

Head of Malware Intelligence Adam Kujawa at Malwarebytes Labs thinks that chances are both assaults occurred from the same groups' malicious operations. Very often, whilst any malware gets utterly familiar among the security community, those behind creating that malware would change its code as well as employ fresh techniques of encryption and/or obfuscation so all detection attempts turn a failure, he explains. Securityweek.com published this dated September 8, 2014.

In general, attackers exploit where resistance is the minimum, according to Bit9 Security Company's CSO Nick Levay. Securityweek.com published this.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/13/2014