New POS malware surfaces

Nick Hoffman, a reverse engineer, came across what appears to be a new family of point-of-sale malware that few antivirus programs were detecting.

Hoffman says that the new POS malware shares traits that are similar to other so-called RAM scrapers. These types of malware collect unencrypted payment card data held in a payment system’s memory.

According to Hoffman, the malware is still evolving. It has yet to have a command-and-control functionality, which is a way that hackers use to issue commands to the malware.

Hoffman wrote: “Its important to track tools like this from their very young stages so that researchers can watch them develop and eventually grow into the next big tool.” Hoffman wrote it evaded 55 antivirus scanners on VirusTotal.

“This malware seems to be in its infancy,” Hoffman wrote. “There are debug strings still existent in the malware indicate to me that the author is still testing the tool or is still actively developing it.”