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FBI Raids Chinese Point-of-Sale Giant Pax Technology

krebsonsecurity.com

1–10 of 14 posts

Re: FBI Raids Chinese Point-of-Sale Giant Pax Technology

#5

"...PAX is now claiming that the investigation is racially and politically motivated.” yikes

No yikes. This is a standard response - deflect and deny when caught. China is engaged in all sorts of cyber warfare, and it's making hardware choice difficult. You have to scrub every device, and even then you have to observe network traffic to see if there are hidden systems trying to phone Beijing.

Re: FBI Raids Chinese Point-of-Sale Giant Pax Technology

#7
Pax had much better APIs for payment integration and was much more friendly to developers than Verifone, Ingenico and other merchant processing hardware manufacturers.

They were the equivalent of Ubiquiti in the pinpad space, when they entered the US market small and medium businesses had little choice besides them (or a much more expensive solution like Square where you do not get to choose your payment processor and pay dearly in fees) if they wanted to have a pinpad that showed custom promotions as a wallpaper, asked for email/phone #, stored cards for recurring payments, could change processors with a hands off remote key injection.

For Point of Sale developers you either get to integrate with a godawful middleware like Datacap or do a direct integration with Ingenico or Verifone and a single payment processor, which creates significant vendor lockin. Your only alternatives were Pax and later Dejavoo offering simple APIs for semi-integrated payments.

Re: FBI Raids Chinese Point-of-Sale Giant Pax Technology

#8

"...PAX is now claiming that the investigation is racially and politically motivated.” yikes

No yikes. This is a standard response - deflect and deny when caught. China is engaged in all sorts of cyber warfare, and it's making hardware choice difficult. You have to scrub every device, and even then you have to observe network traffic to see if there are hidden systems trying to phone Beijing.

I don't know.... How can a competitor to Pax even know how the Pax servers are being handled internally?

This seems out of the ordinary for this type of thing investigation

Re: FBI Raids Chinese Point-of-Sale Giant Pax Technology

#9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No yikes. This is a standard response - deflect and deny when caught. China is engaged in all sorts of cyber warfare, and it's making hardware choice difficult. You have to scrub every device, and even then you have to observe network traffic to see if there are hidden systems trying to phone Beijing.

I don't know.... How can a competitor to Pax even know how the Pax servers are being handled internally? This seems out of the ordinary for this type of thing investigation

I don’t follow? The accusation is that their point of sale terminals were used as launching off points for attacks. Why would someone need to know “how their servers are being handled internally” to know an attack came from one of their devices installed locally.
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