Stated that Data breaches have become a general problem in the wholesale, financial, and healthcare sectors, resulting in mass exfiltration of sensitive customer 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.
The Home Depot Breach Perhaps one of the bigger data breaches as it pertains to retailers in the last couple of years is that of The Home Depot, hereinafter referred to as HD. This breach has been notorious because the attackers used a similar tactic to gain access to their systems as seen in the 2013 Target breach. According to a press release by HD, “Criminals used a third-party vendor’s user name and password to enter the perimeter of HD’s network.” (Dayhoff & Holmes, 2014). From there the attackers were able to elevate the privileges on the infected machine and subsequently install malware on the self-checkout devices.
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NCR SelfServ Platform. The malware that has been dubbed MozartPOS is a customized Random Access Memory (RAM) scraper designed to run on the HD network. The malware, upon execution, creates a Windows Service called NCR SelfServ Platform (Hoffman, 2015). This technology is software used for self-checkout terminals (Smith, 2000) that were targeted in the HD breach. The fact that the malware was named to mimicrunning applications in the HD environment indicates that the attackers had access to the network with sufficient time to customize the malware to hide and operate effectively in the targeted