Dexter payment card malware strikes South Africa

  • 16 October 2013
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Leo Kelion wrote:
 
South Africa has been hit by one of the biggest cyber-fraud attacks in its history, according to the body that oversees local financial transactions.
The payment card systems of thousands of shops, restaurants and hotels had been compromised, said the Payment Association of South Africa (Pasa).
 
It added the attackers had used a new variant of the malware known as Dexter.
 
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/70508000.jpg/_70508757_dexter2.jpg
The malware may have been named after the US television show Dexter
 
 
Ten million rand is worth £626,000 or just over $1m.
 
Dexter gets its name from a string of code found in one of its files, which may refer to the US television show that followed the exploits of a serial killer.
 
The Dexter code was linked to a series of attacks on point-of-sale systems in the UK, US and dozens of other countries towards the end of last year.
 
 Read here.

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Userlevel 7
Hong Kei Chan wrote:
Dexter, a custom point-of-sale (POS) malware, has the ability to search through the memory of POS systems for credit and debit card information. POS malware have been making headlines this year, from Target’s data breach – where it has been reported that approximately 40 million credit and debit card accounts had been compromised (Source) – to more recently, a new strain of POS malware compromising over 4,500 credit cards in the United States and Canada (Source).
How exactly do these POS malware steal credit card information?
This blog post will begin with a brief overview of Dexter’s key features before delving into the information stealing techniques: key logging and memory parsing.

 Read here.

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