[ISN] Restaurants Sue Vendor for Unsecured Card Processor

[InfoSec News]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/pos/

By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
November 30, 2009

Seven restaurants have sued the maker of a bank card-processing system 
for failing to secure the product from a Romanian hacker who breached 
their systems.

The restaurants, located in Louisiana and Mississippi, have filed a 
class-action suit against Georgia-based Radiant Systems for producing a 
point-of-sale (POS) system that they say was not compliant with payment 
card industry security standards and resulted in an undetermined number 
of customers having their debit and credit card numbers stolen.

The suit alleges that the system stored all of the data embedded on the 
bank card magnetic stripe after the transaction was completed -- a 
violation of industry security standards that made the systems a 
high-risk target for hackers.

Also named in the suit is Computer World, a Louisiana-based retailer, 
which sold and maintained Radiant's Aloha POS system.

According to plaintiffs, Computer World's technicians allegedly 
installed the remote-access program PCAnywhere on the systems to allow 
its technicians to fix technical problems from off-site. The only 
problem is, the company failed to secure the program. The suit alleges 
that the system was not up to date with software patches, and the 
PCAnywhere remote log-in and password that technicians used to access 
the POS systems was the same at every one of the 200 Louisiana locations 
where the system was installed. According to one of the plaintiffs who 
spoke with Threat Level, the default login was "administrator" and the 
password was "computer."

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