Following Brian Krebs’ report on a data breach at Oracle’s MICROS Point-of-Sale Division, Thomas Pore, Director of IT at Plixer commented below how the attacks worked, the perils of third party risk and what what we should learn from this breach.
Thomas Pore, Director of IT at Plixer:
“While phishing has proven to be very effective, what if attackers didn’t need to phish all their targets—just a third party who has access to them? Third-party risk can have severe consequences. While it appears that the attackers have compromised one of the MICROS customer support portals supporting point-of-sale (PoS) systems, if the portal compromised allowed remote access to MICROS customer PoS systems, it would be very easy to install malware to retrieve payment information.
“Interestingly, one of the MICROS support portals utilizes Bomgar, a secure support application that allows for remote connectivity. Bomgar has even announced they were selected to support more than 330,000 MICROS systems. KrebsonSecurity has reported that Oracle is recommending a password change for all support accounts accessing MICROS support portal and any accounts use by a MICROS representative.
“It is concerning to think that an attacker has the possibility of remotely administering any MICROS customers. We should all learn from this experience and review which of our vendors have remote access to our networks.”
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