The groups of cybercrime have been exploiting an active weakness in the point-of-sale network at gas stations as they steak the data of credit cards. Visa has made this revelation. The fraud disruption team of the company has investigated a lot of the incidents in which a group which is actively involved in hacking and is known as the Fin8 has defrauded the merchants of fuel dispenser. In all of these cases, the attackers were able to get the access to the networks of point-of-sales through their malicious mails and other methods which are not known yet. They had then installed the scrapping of POS software which exploited the security issues with the mag stripe old school cards that do not have a PIN code.
This hack is not something that affects the chip and pin cards that are more secure however not every consumer has those so the service stations in many cases work with the mag stripe ones as well. This data has apparently been sent in a form that is unencrypted to the main network of the vendor where the thieves are able to figure out a way of intercepting it. The other issue with a POS system is that they are not firewalled off the other parts of their networks that are less critical. This allows the thieves from gaining the lateral access post the breach of the network.
There are not a lot of things the cardholders are able to do for avoiding these attacks however Visa has been advising their fuel merchants to encrypt this data as it is transferred or possibly use a policy of chip and PIN.