Several Restaurants Sue Vendor for Unsecured Card Processor

"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, filed a class-action suitagainst 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 the data embedded on the bank card magnetic stripe after the transaction was completed — a violation of industry security standards that made it 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.”

As a result, a hacker, believed to be based in Romania, accessed the systems of at least 19 businesses through the PCAnywhere software, and possibly others plaintiffs say. "

Image courtesy California State Controller’s Office & Wired

Read the full story by Kim Zetter of Wired