A notorious cybercrime gang is believed to have breached hundreds of systems at Oracle’s MICROS point-of-sale (PoS) division. The tech giant has reset customer passwords following the incident.
MICROS, which Oracle acquired in 2014 for $5.3 billion, is one of the world’s largest PoS services providers. At the time of its acquisition by Oracle, the company’s products had been deployed at more than 330,000 locations across 180 countries.
Security blogger Brian Krebs learned of the breach on July 25, after being notified by an Oracle MICROS customer. According to Krebs, Oracle initially believed the breach only affected a small number of machines at its retail division, but further analysis led to the identification of more than 700 infected systems.
Oracle is still investigating the incident, but it has confirmed finding malicious code on certain legacy systems. The breach also appears to have affected a customer support portal on which the company has reset all user passwords. The organization has also advised customers to change their passwords for any account used by MICROS representatives to access their on-premises systems.
Unnamed security experts involved in the investigation revealed that the breached MICROS support portal had been found to communicate with a server previously associated with Carbanak, a multinational cybercrime gang accused of stealing up to one billion dollars from more than 100 banks over a period of roughly two years.
Considering that Carbanak is highly skilled when it comes to such attacks, it’s possible that the cybercrooks used their access to infect the PoS devices of MICROS customers with malware.
Oracle pointed out that payment card data is encrypted in MICROS-hosted customer environments, but experts suggested the attackers might have been able to leverage the access MICROS representatives had to users’ systems.
Carbanak was recently spotted launching a new campaign targeting banks in the Middle East, the United States and other countries. In addition to banks, the group has started attacking the budgeting and account departments of enterprise software firms, financial organizations, and professional services companies.
Numerous PoS malware attacks have been discovered over the past period in the United States. The list of recent victims includes Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas, Wendy’s, Noodles & Company, and Omni Hotels.
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