One of the biggest breaches to hit Indian has leaked as many as 3.2 million payment card details, leaving financial institutions scrambling as they try to pick up the pieces.
Officials believe that the breach originated from malware on the Hitachi Payment Services platform, who provides ATM and point of sales services, allowing thieves to steal information and ultimately steal funds.
According to the Economic Times, of the 3.2 million cards, 2.6 are said to be on the Visa and MasterCard platform and 600,000 on the RuPay platform. The worst hit of the banks include the State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, and Axis Bank.
Some researchers believe that this malware infection took over six weeks to detect and compromised all the transactions that took place during that time period.
The Payment Council of India has ordered all Indian banks to conduct a forensic audit on all servers and systems in order to spot the origin of frauds that may have hit customer accounts.
POS Systems have always been an easy target for fraudsters but had Hitachi had NNT’s non-stop File Integrity Monitoring implemented, they would have been notified when a new system file was detection, and also the registry and service list changes. Even better, a hardened build standard would have been implemented to restrict access and privileges on the POS system.
Read this article on SCMagazine