18.6.19 – CYBER INTELLIGENCE NEWS

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Checkers restaurant chain discloses huge credit card breach.

Checkers and Rally’s, one of the biggest drive-thru restaurant chains in the US, disclosed a security incident that impacted over 100 locations.

the company said hackers breached its systems and planted malware on its payments processing system. also known as POS, abbreviation of Point of Sale.

The malware was designed to collect information from the magnetic stripe of payment cards and was capable of detecting and extracting data such as the cardholder name, payment card number, card verification code, and expiration date.

The company listed the addresses and the dates during which the malware was active on the network of each of the impacted restaurants. The list includes the addresses of 102 drive-thru restaurants, operating under the Checkers or the Rally’s brands. 

Point of sale attacks are very profitable, the attackers have to install the malware only once and it can generate revenue for them for years. Checkers detected that the attacks against them started as early as 2016 and most of the malware infections took place during 2017 and 2018 , the malware continued to work until it was discovered during 2019.

The trend of attacking Point of sales in food and retail chains exists for several years now and almost every month we hear about new retail or food chain that suffered from a successful cyber attack.

Germany have a big fleet of airplanes dedicated for the goverment use. 

The fleet used by Germany’s senior government officials consists of twelve aircrafts, most of them old and served for many years.

During the last couple of years a series of problems discovered in the different planes, In 2018 the Chancellor of Germany had to get to the G20 leaders summit in Argentina but one hour after take off the plane had to return back because of communications failure.

The Foreign minister had to cancel more than 3 flights because of different problems found before takeoff during 2018.

Also the president of Germany had to cancel and face delays at least 3 times in 2019 each time with different problems that were found. During April 2019, airbus plane that was scheduled to take the president to important meeting the was cancelled in the last minute because of cracks in the windows, it was reported that the government had to hire a private jet to make the flight because all the other planes in the fleet was grounded because of technical problems.

This embracement caused the german government to place an order for 3 new A-350 Airbus airplanes for 1.2 Billion Euros that will be delivered by 2023.

The press in Germany reported that the Police and the internal security services have started investigating the possibility some of the malfunctions in the planes were caused by sabotage or cyber attacks in order to ground the german leadership. so far no evidence to support a cyber attack were found as much as publicly known. 

That’s it for this podcast, stay safe and see you in the next podcast.

Don’t forget to visit www.cybercure.ai for the latest podcasts on cyber intelligence.

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