Harbortouch, which provides Point of Sales (POS) systems to thousands of businesses in the United States, was hit by a breach in which some of its restaurant and bar customers were attacked by malware . The malware allowed hackers to access customers' card information through affected merchants.
One issuer of such cards told KrebsOnSecurity that the agency was unaware of the severity of the breach. And the company's ignorance would have affected more than 4,200 Harbortouch customers nationwide.
Before Harbortouch made the disclosure, several sources involved in the financial industry suspected that there had been a possible breach at a credit card processing business.
According to an article published on KrebsOnSecurity, this suspicion grew when banks realized they could not easily identify a specific merchant.
Some banks wanted to know about the unreported fraud, as the stolen cards were used to purchase goods from major stores. They made some changes to the way they processed debit card transactions
United Bank recently issued a notice stating that, in an effort to protect its customers, following reports of fraudulent transactions at grocery stores and similar stores, such as WalMart and Target, a block has been initiated in which customers will be required to select 'Debit' and enter their 'PIN' for transactions at these stores using their United Bank debit card.
Harbortouch issued a statement last week stating that it had identified an incident that affected a small percentage of its merchants. It also confirmed the involvement of a malware installation on the POS systems. The sophisticated malware was designed in such a way that the antivirus program running on the POS System was unable to detect it.
Harbortouch, however, removed the malware from affected systems when the problem was detected.
The company explained in the statement that it does not directly process or store cardholder data, and only a small percentage of its merchants were affected for a short period of time.
However, sources who released the massive fraud details through a KrebsOnSecurity editor on condition of anonymity said the breach extended to at least 4,200 stores running Harbortouch's POS software.
Nate Hirshberg, Harbortouch's Chief Marketing Officer, said these statements are not true.
