Eating out at Zoup? Be careful while using the credit card.
Thousands may be affected by a credit card breach that originated at the popular point-of-sale vendor NEXTEP systems which serves Zoup, and many other restaurants, corporate cafeterias, casinos, airports.
The incident came to light after sources in the financial institutions noted that all the cards which have recently showed fraudulent activity have been used at any of the 75 Zoup outlets across northern half of the United States and Canada. Zoup, one of Nextep’s biggest customers uses Nextep’s services at all outlets.
On being contacted by KrebsonSecurity, Zoup CEO Eric Ersher referred the calls to Nextep who admitted the breach. Nextep President Tommy Woycik however added that he believed not all customers were impacted by the breach.
The pattern of breach is similar to the ones at other fast food chains — Dairy Queen and Jimmy Johns, reported last year. In all such cases, malware is injected at the point of sale systems, which is designed to steal data encoded onto the magnetic strip at the back of credit and debit cards. The stolen data is then used to create counterfeit cards, which are then typically used to make purchases at big-box retailers. Such stolen cards are of considerable value at the underground cybercrime stores, and each card is sold for anywhere between $20 and $100.
It is not clear how the nextep breach occurred but if previous examples are studied, the cause might be traced to stolen credentials which were then used to remotely administer malware into the system.
Effects of breach at point of sale vendors are huge. Last year, breach at the POS vendor Signature Systems Inc affected Jimmy John sandwich shops and at least 100 other restaurants. Earlier this year, Advanced Restaurant Management Applications (ARMA) suffered from a similar breach that affected many of its client restaurants.
Historically, food institutions have been prone to these attacks.While attacks at chain restaurants can be well detected owing to pattern originating from the huge data collated, the magnitude of the breach also increases owing to the number of outlets it affects.
KrebsOnSecurity is currently tracking down the commonalities between the POS breaches across the country.
