Point of sales vendor Lightspeed has been breached with password, customer data, and API keys possibly exposed. Lightspeed has notified customers in an email saying that the information was contained in a compromised database but was not confirmed to be stolen.

It boats more than 38,000 customers transacting US$12 billion annually. The company has been contacted for comment. In a letter sent to customers Lightspeed offered some limited details on the breach. Lightspeed maintains a central database of sales, product and customer information as well as encrypted passwords and API Keys.

Hackers have attacked 20 hotels run by HEI Hotels and Resorts, including Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood and Intercontinental with a targeted malware. The cyberattack may likely have resulted in personal and financial information of thousands of customers being stolen and leaked.

Privately-owned HEI, which is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, confirmed that the data breach was first discovered in June this year and was found to be targeting PoS systems. The firm also said that the malware was specifically designed to steal card data used by customers to make payments. HEI said that the malware affected 12 Starwood hotels.

Security researchers have found a new memory-scraping malware program that steals payment card data from point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and sends it back to attackers using the Domain Name System.

Dubbed Multigrain, the threat is part of a family of malware programs known as NewPosThings, with which it shares some code. However, this variant was designed to target specific environments. That's because unlike other PoS malware programs that look for card data in the memory of many processes, Multigrain targets a single process called multi.exe that's associated with a popular back-end card authorization and PoS server.

Long gone are the days when hackers would make malware just for fun. Nowadays malware is there not to simply cripple a PC, as it once was, but rather to make money for those who have created and infected your computer with it. Cybercrime is an industry unto itself with both large and small players.

Our GReAT experts have recently discovered another player in the space, which they have dubbed the Poseidon Group. Their research on this group was presented at the Security Analyst Summit 2016. While the research was presented in 2016, the group is hardly a new player. Campaigns from this group seem to have been active since 2005.

A new kind of point-of-sale malware similar to that which struck Target is being sold in underground markets. The malware was found on VirusTotal, a website where people can submit malware samples to see if one of several dozen security applications detects it. 

It had also been advertised on an underground carding website, where people buy and sell stolen payment card data. Retailers across the USA have been hit hard by malware that scans the volatile memory of computers connected to point-of-sale systems, which handle card payments. It appears to share some of the same source code as Dexter and other characteristics of Chewbacca.