
Today, iSIGHT Partners is sharing details about a highly
sophisticated criminal malware framework that has been used to
target point-of-sale (POS) systems at US-based retailers. We believe
this very hard to detect malware is likely being used in broader
campaigns and are disclosing details to help retailers and other
organizations with POS and other payment processing systems hunt for
and eradicate the malware.
iSIGHT
Partners has already briefed numerous retailers and other
organizations that are involved with payment systems, and our
experts are also actively working with the Retail Cyber Intelligence
Sharing Center ( target="_blank">R-CISC) to help its members detect and stop this
virulent malware.
You will find a
summary of ModPOS below, or href="http://info.isightpartners.com/ModPOS-malware-disclosure-report">download
the full Intelligence Report with Indicators here.
We
know that US retailers have been targeted and believe it is very
likely that criminal actors are seeking to compromise additional
victims beyond those identified. We observed a small element of the
ModPOS framework as far back as 2012, with known activity in late
2013 and active targeting of US retailers through 2014. Given its
sophistication, it has taken our malware analysis ninjas a
substantial amount of time to reverse engineer the software.

While attribution is always a difficult proposition, we have
some indication that the ModPOS malware may have ties to Eastern
Europe. This belief is based on IP addresses resolving to this
region in samples we reverse engineered and other factors we are not
disclosing.
In a nutshell, this is
not your daddy's run-of-the-mill cyber crime malware.
The use of
EMV technology itself does not ensure that POS systems and card data
are fully protected in all circumstances. EMV was designed to make
it very difficult for malicious actors to manufacture perfect clones
using stolen card data and is a key element in protecting the card
system in toto. However, if the system configuration does not
support end-to-end encryption, including encrypting data in memory,
then ModPOS and other malware with RAM scraping techniques can still
gain access to card data. Criminals can then reuse card data, even
from EMV cards, to make online (card-not-present) transactions.
We are making the
ModPOS details and technical indicators publicly available in an
effort to protect future victims and provide retailers and other POS
and payment system operators the information they need to hunt for
the ModPOS malware in their environments.