Point of Sale Failure

This is the story of somebody who visited their local car shop the other day...

While they were sitting waiting for their car to finish being inspected they pulled out a phone and did a quick sweep of the company’s WiFi network, to which they were connected after having received the relevant password from the front desk.

Two systems jumped out as interesting, both Dells, according to their MAC vendor IDs. They had TCP port 445 open, meaning they were most likely Windows PCs with file sharing enabled.

They then launched the FileBrowser SMB file access app against one of the systems. Sure enough there were a whole bunch of shared directories and files available, no password required. A little further digging revealed exactly what this system was. It was one of the point of sale devices (cash registers) from the front desk, sitting wide open on the same WiFi network that all of their customers had access to.

Not only is this a catastrophically dumb idea, but it flies in the face of numerous payment card industry regulatory practices and requirements.

No wonder things like this happen.