Understanding and Preventing Threats to Point of Sale Systems

Data breaches have become a systemic problem in the retail, financial, and healthcare sectors, resulting in mass exfiltration of sensitive customer and/or patient data. These breaches continue to be a major problem for all sectors, but primarily that of the retail sector. It has seen many different Point-of-Sale systems compromised, databases stolen, and customer data sold in underground forums. Many studies and white papers describe and analyze these breaches in detail, but fail to address all aspects of a single breach in one succinct article. As such, practitioners are only educated in part on the threats and the methods to mitigate these threats. This paper will cover three of the more prominent breaches, how the breaches occurred, how data was stolen, and actions organizations need to take to mitigate or, hopefully, eliminate the threats altogether.