Weak link: How hackers attack citizens and organizations even in restaurants

In the modern world, a restaurant is a rather high-tech business that uses software (for example, automation systems like Jowi ) and various kinds of equipment. However, the fact that restaurants are rarely the target of cybercriminals is discouraging the owners and, sometimes, the developers of the respective systems.

As a result, when an attack on a restaurant does happen, it takes the victims and the administration of the restaurant unawares. In our today's material - three such known cases.
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Attack on the oil campaign through the online menu in a Chinese restaurant

In 2014, New York Times journalists wrote about an interesting case of a cyber attack on a major oil company, which was carried out by infecting a restaurant system nearby.



According to researchers polled by the publication, cybercriminals could not break through the organization’s security systems and decided to act smarter. Many employees of the oil company liked to order takeaway at a Chinese restaurant nearby. Hackers attacked the system to order online and infected it with malicious software.

As a result, when employees of the company, which was the ultimate goal of the attack, looked through the menus from their smartphones and tablets, they unknowingly downloaded the malicious code that, once inside the company’s internal network, opened up to the attackers.

Theft of data of Pentagon employees

In September 2015, there were reports of an attack on restaurant equipment located in the Pentagon’s cafeteria (although only copies of these notes from the cache are now available on the network). According to some bloggers, the information leaked to the network from a message sent to employees on the internal network.

As a result, the attackers managed to steal billing information and personal data of some employees of the US defense department. The cybersecurity service also found attempts to use this data to complete transactions.



A spokesman for the US Department of Defense told reporters that the hacker attack affected only the software part of the equipment used to receive employee payments for food ordered. Other comments on the possible consequences and causes of hacking have been reported.

$ 3 million lesson for Subway

As it turned out in 2011, over the course of several years, customers of Subway fast food restaurants in the United States were at risk of embezzlement of financial information. A group of Romanian hackers managed to steal bank card data from more than 150 Subway points in three years.

Hacking became possible due to the carelessness of the owners of enterprises operating under the franchise model - they saved and installed software on the equipment without proper security tools, besides, the concept of information security did not exist for them in principle, as a result of which the POS terminal interfaces stuck open . This allowed hackers to detect them simply by scanning ports.



Having connected to the equipment, the attackers remotely installed malicious software on it, which, among other things, read the information entered - the pin codes of the cards and the magnetic strip data. It also installed a trojan that allowed to reconnect to systems, download new malware and block the installation of security updates. Ultimately, the attackers managed to steal more than $ 3 million

The collected data was uploaded via FTP to various sites registered through the Godaddy company (domains justfuckit.info) - for this, stolen billing data was used. All these operations were carried out through all the same POS-terminals, but for a long time none of the staff at Subway points noticed the oddities.