The post was authored byBen BakerandEarl Carter.

Payment cards without an EMV chip have reached their end-of-life. Point of Sale (PoS) malware, such asPoSeidon, has continued to threaten businesses. The news is continually filled with stories of payment card data being stolen through a breach in the company's PoS system. From high-end hotels to large retail firms, threat actors are attacking PoS systems in the attempt to capture payment card data. PoS Malware is just another threat category that Talos is monitoring and developing defenses against. In this post, we will examine the functionality of Pro PoS so that you can better understand how this malware can be used to exfiltrate payment card information and potentially other valuable information from your network.

Beginning in October, merchants in the United States were required to use PoS terminals that provide support for chip-enabled cards or otherwise risk liability for fraudulent charges. These new chip-enabled readers help minimize the chance for PoS malware to steal payment card information because the chip on the payment card generates a single use token. This transition, however has been bumpy at best because the cost of new chip-enabled readers has made it difficult to upgrade to the newer readers. Another loophole is that gas stations have a different timeline and are not required to move to chip-based readers until October 2017. These two factors mean that many establishments still rely on card readers that are not chip-enabled and sending payment card data that can be duplicated and reused.

Pro PoS is simple-to-use PoS malware that is available for purchase, enabling multiple threat actors to easily take advantage of this malware to target businesses. Thefunctionality of Pro PoSseems fairly extensive according to recent press releases. These claims include the following:

1. Tor support
2. Rootkit functionalities
3. Mechanisms to avoid antivirus detection
4. Polymorphic engine

In order to analyze the actual capabilities of Pro PoS, Talos collaborated withFlashpoint, a pioneer in threat intelligence from the Deep & Dark Web Not all of the claims in the press releases seem to be totally accurate given the Pro PoS version 1.1.5b sample that Talos analyzed. For instance we did not identify any significant mechanisms to avoid antivirus detection, other than a trivial packer that seemed to be more for compression than obfuscation. Unless you include tor2web, we did not find support for Tor. We did not find a Polymorphic engine. And finally, we did observe a rootkit being installed but it did not appear to be used by the malware.

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