What is POS malware?

POS malware is a type of malware using which cybercriminals steal sensitive credit card data of victims and exploit that for malicious purposes and cause heavy financial loss to the victims. The malware infects a POS system and then collects the credit card data of users from the POS system when the cards are swiped for making payments.

What is POS?

POS or Point of Sale is the time and place where a retail transaction is completed. Merchants usually use a system to collect POS data from customers. The POS system may consist of a weighing scale, a scanner, electronic and manual cash registers, a payment terminal, etc. When a customer makes a payment, the POS system registers the POS data of the customer after the payments are made.

In the POS malware attack, the cybercriminals use malware to infect a POS System and extract sensitive credit card data of users from the POS system.

How do attackers steal credit card data?

In earlier days, cybercriminals used to use additional hardware to steal the credit card data of users from the POS system. They would often install the malicious hardware into the POS System and read the sensitive data from the cards whenever the cards used to be swiped.

However, cybercriminals gradually found this attack to be much more inconvenient. And so they started to infect POS systems with malware to collect sensitive data.