“The CEO of retailer Target revealed Saturday in an interview that the company’s point-of-sale (PoS) systems were infected with malware, confirming what security experts suspected since the massive data breach was announced in mid-December,” Lucian Constantin reports for PCWorld. “Answering a question about what caused the breach during an interview for CNBC, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel said: ‘We don’t know the full extent of what transpired, but what we do know is that there was malware installed on our point-of-sale registers. That much we’ve established.'”

“Target originally said that approximately 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been impacted by the breach. The company announced Friday that information like names, email addresses, mailing addresses and phone numbers of an additional 70 million people has also been stolen,” Constantin reports. “PoS systems are actually computers with peripherals like card readers and keypads attached to them. Many of these systems run a version of Windows Embedded as the OS as well as special cash register software. Target said that the credit and debit card information was stolen from its systems between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15.

“Visa issued two security alerts last year, in April and August, warning merchants of attacks using memory-parsing PoS malware,” Constantin reports. “‘Since January 2013, Visa has seen an increase in network intrusions involving retail merchants,’ Visa said in its August advisory. ‘Once inside the merchant’s network, the hacker will install memory parser malware on the Windows based cash register system in each lane or on the Back-of-the-House (BOH) servers to extract full magnetic stripe data in random access memory (RAM).'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Windows Embedded? Those terminals were PoS, indeed. Microsoft Windows. The gift that keeps on giving. Apple Retail Stores unaffected.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]

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