Payment Card Details of "Cici's Pizza" Customers Have Been Stolen By Hackers!
Coppell, Texas based food Chain "Cicis" have more than 450 franchised restaurants. The payment card details of its customers have been stolen by the hackers with the help of a POS (point-of-sale) malware. From the starting of March, Security team of Cicis was getting reports from its different restaurants that the Point-of-Sale systems are not working properly. The behavior of POS systems was unnatural and later it turned up into a malware. According to an official report of Cicis, this POS malware has infected approximately 138 restaurants at different locations.
Cicis have its restaurants in 35 states of United States. This POS malware have infected its Texas Restaurants the most. From 138 infected restaurants, 87 are located in Texas. A forensic firm of United States was investigating this incident and according to their report, the POS systems of infected restaurants were hacked by hackers in March 2016. Hackers were doing their work slowly to collect maximum payment card details. The most shocking fact about this incident is, Point-of-Sale systems of many restaurants were in the control of hackers since last year.
According to Cicis, the payment card details of their customers at risk. Further they added, "We are working hard to fix our database and POS systems. A number of infected POS systems have been recovered and many systems are still under process. We can't say right now that our restaurants are fully secure. Our security team is doing work on it."
This is not a new incident which happened with POS systems. The biggest problem of retail business is that their Point-of-Sale systems are less secure. Most of the Retail Business firms are using advanced security techniques to protect their POS systems from malwares.
The checkout terminals of POS systems are its weakest point. Because these are less secured, hackers could easily exploit it to install that malwares in it, which could easily steal payment card details. A number of security techniques are available now to secure the POS systems. Tokenization and End-to-End encryption are two main security methods to protect the data from dangerous malwares.
