Yet another data breech in credit card systems

MarketWatch: As the holiday shopping season kicks off, cyber threat intelligence experts have announced they have discovered the most sophisticated point-of-sale malware to date. It has already impacted multiple national retailers and millions of credit cards. Cyber threat intelligence company iSight Partners Inc. has been tracking the malware, called ModPOS, short for “modular point-of-sale system,” since it discovered early signs of its framework in 2012, said Stephen Ward, a senior director at iSight Partners.

“You could almost call this an evolution in the way cyber crime is being done at the point of sale,” said Jake Williams, an information security consultant.

The system is comparable to a Swiss Army knife because it is able to tap into shoppers’ information in many different ways, from determining what type of software a cashier is using to figuring out consumers’ usernames and passwords to tracking the keystrokes cashiers make during check-out, Ward says. Later, those using the malware can use that credit-card information in transactions for which a physical credit card isn’t required. 

Old time retail companies are collecting personal data about us and exposing it to web thieves.   is is the problem with cashlerss systems, there is always a clearing house that finds value in personal data. To yuse the data, the retail vendor must expose it somewhere.

SmartCard eliminates the problem since all transactions are encrypted, the transaction will be honest, double entry accounting; card to card.  No clearing house needed, the encryption key is valid and unknown by any human.  No personal data leaves the SmartCard encrypted network.