Dexter raids millions from Saffer bank accounts

Millions of dollars have been stolen from South African banks by the Dexter virus which targets point-of-sale devices.

Hundreds of thousands of customers have had credit, debit and check cards compromised by attacks against fast food restaurants traced to Europe, according to reports.

The attacks were made by a new variant of the malware first discovered last year which evades anti-virus.

“We have seen several variants of Dexter in the past, so a new variant targeting specifically South Africa point-of-sales is not a surprise,” Seculert chief technology officer Aviv Raff said.

"New variants of Dexter, including this one, show that this threat is evolving, adding new techniques to evade traditional security solutions.”

UK-based information security business Foregenix was called in but a spokesperson with the company told SC this is an "active investigation” and deferred comment to the Payments Association of South Africa which did not respond to a request for comment.

The malware searched for Track 1 and Track 2 credit card data used to create cloned credit cards.

“Different variants of Dexter focus on different regions around the world,” Raff said. “We have seen Dexter variants that target English speaking countries, and others which target European countries only.”

This article originally appeared at scmagazineus.com