The Day Memory Scraping Malware Lost

Every organization today is, or should be, concerned about the spread of dangerous malware being launched in targeted attacks. An example of a recent trend is the aggressive use of memory scraping malware by cyber-criminals against any organization that accepts credit cards – this incudes retail, healthcare, financial services, governmental entities and others. The headlines reflect the scale of the issue – every week there are new headlines of record setting data loss and credit card data theft in organizations of all sizes.

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The issue that causes the most concern about these damaging attacks is that each of these breached organizations had invested a great deal of money and effort to put in place and support a multi-layered in-depth security solution. In addition, they were in certified compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GLBA and other regulations. Doubt has surfaced for many organizations who are now wondering “If these large sophisticated companies that take security seriously were breached, how can I be safe?”

The unfortunate reality is that these “successes” illustrate that the traditional security products being used today cannot stop the new generation of targeted attacks that include advanced malware. Over the past year or so the leading security vendors have been acknowledging their inability to stop malware from getting into your systems – even claiming that “AV is dead”. As a means to keep revenue coming in, they are now pushing companies to buy new security analytics software from them based on the idea that if they can’t stop the attack they may be able to help discover the breach sooner than later as a means to minimize the loss. Sorry, but "less" data loss is still data loss! Do we really have to give up the battle to stop malware before it does damage?

No. Do not give up the fight against malware. With the right technology, it is possible to identify and stop malware from penetrating your defenses and stealing your data. A white paper recently written by expert malware researchers analyzes this new generation of memory scraping malware by looking at the most prominent one used in some recent history-making attacks. This memory scraping malware, Backoff, can be stopped, even if it has gotten past the perimeter defenses and is trying to get the credit card data in the memory of the PC. The white paper does a deep analysis of the stages that Backoff uses to penetrate, install, run, hide, steal (scrape) the data, move it out of the PoS and repeat.

Download the Backoff White Paper - How does it work and how can you stop it