Fergie's Tech Blog

Study: PC Infections Plague Wire-Transfer Shops

An AP newswire article by Jordan Robertson, via SFGate.com, reports that:

For immigrants who send money to their home countries, wire-transfer shops are backbones of their neighborhoods. On some blocks in San Francisco's Mission District, every third or fourth business might offer some sort of money transfer service, and they're always bustling, even on a Sunday morning.

The customers probably don't suspect one danger that apparently often lurks in the storefronts: a startling number of viruses on the computers used to transmit their financial information.

Some 60 percent of the PCs examined in 300 wire-transfer businesses in Los Angeles and Las Vegas were infected with nasty viruses, according to a study due to be released Thursday by Spanish software vendor Panda Security.

The viruses Panda found included the worst kinds: keyloggers that record the users' every keystroke, and other types of malicious programs that give hackers backdoor access to the compromised machines. Some infected machines held troves of private data, from Social Security numbers to credit card numbers to tax documents.

posted by Fergie @ 12/10/2008 05:40:00 PM