Global botnet infects 1,500 PoS terminals in 36 countries

Businesses in 36 countries were found by security researchers to have been infected with the PoS botnet. 1,500 point-of-sale (POS) terminals, accounting systems and other retail back-office platforms were found to be infected.

Joined together with a botnet dubbed Nemanja, the researchers think the origin is from Serbia.

The researchers from IntelCrawler said: “We predict an increasing number of new data breaches in both sectors in the next few years, as well as the appearance of new types of specific malicious code targeted at retailers’ back office systems and cash registers.”

The botnet included 1,478 infected systems in countries on most continents including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, China, Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

The malware also had keylogging functionality to intercept credentials that could provide access to other systems and databases that contained payment or personally identifiable information.