Media Coverage

Somewhat interestingly, the individual conducting the chat conversation did not appear to know the ransom amount that the victim was being asked to pay and appeared reliant on the honesty of the victim to provide that information. “That’s because they haven’t built a channel to upload data from the victim to the ‘call center,’” says Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at Trend Micro.

“The benefit is the user doesn't get infected, so the likelihood that they won't report the issue to the website owner is higher than if malware was used to infect them,” Trend Micro Senior Global Marketing Manager Jon Clay told SCMagazine.com. “This allows their scam to run longer than normal.”

FastPOS doesn't care about this aspect, and Trend Micro says the malware sends any stolen data to the C&C server as soon as it can get its hands on it.

While analyzing the threat, researchers with security firm Trend Micro observed that it was designed to target Windows XP 64-bit computers and that it can also run on more recent versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and 8.

“Most targeted attacks take minutes or seconds for the initial compromise,” explains Ed Cabrera, VP of Cyber Security Strategy at Trend Micro. “But it takes months or years to detect them.”