Fuel Pump stations POS terminals are vulnerable to Cyber Attacks says VISA

Visa, the American Multinational Financial services provider has warned all the fuel station owners in America against a possible cyber threat to the POS terminals being used at their gas stations.

According to the details available to Cybersecurity Insiders, three gas stations were cyber-attacked in Summer’19 where the objective of the hackers was to simply scrape the credit and debit card info from the black strips of the VISA payment cards.

The warning was in align with the FBI alert issued in November this year which claimed that fuel merchants were becoming attractive targets to hackers as the machines they were using lacked Point-to-Point encryption and were not compliant with the PCI DSS standards.

Visa Payment Fraud Disruption(VPFD) center stated that some cyber crooks managed to compromise PoS systems with infected malware via Remote Access Trojans which in-turn offered them direct network access to sensitive details such as card data.

In the past two years, Point of Sale systems which are still using black strip cards was being targeted on a major note. So, fuel dispensing machines linked to Chip-based card transactions are supposed to be safe and those which aren’t are supposed to be vulnerable to hackers claim the recent statement made by VISA.

And the only way to dodge the cyberattacks launched by hackers is to interlink Chip-based PoS systems with fuel dispensers, as it will significantly cut down the cyber risks associated with attacks.

Note- All fuel dispenser merchants aka gas stations are being asked to deploy chip-based card readers by October 2020 failing which the liability of card frauds will shift from customers to merchants on an official note after the stipulated time frame.