POS Breaches Threaten Holiday Shopping Season

Point of sale checkout counterThe point of sales (POS) breaches at Hilton, and Starwood before that, suggest that a group of hackers is specifically targeting hotels, probably because most travelers have above average income. It should also make us brace for a likely wave of further POS breaches in many other businesses during the holiday shopping season. It really makes me wish that more merchants accepted secure payment tools like Apple Pay, or even that more than a small fraction accepted the new chip and signature cards.

Hilton Data Breach Focuses Attention On Growing POS Malware Threat

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Stolen Credit Card website hacked

Vendor of Stolen Bank Cards Hacked — Krebs on Security Brian Krebs has an interesting blog post on how all of the credit card information was stolen by a hacker from a website that sells stolen credit cards.

This is in the "don't know whether to laugh or cry" department.