“If that’s something that a retail chain does as a matter of policy across a whole chain of stores, that can be pretty damaging.” “Not all stores power cycle overnight, but for those that do, they came up all blank and inoperative,” Rochette said. Rochette said that the supermarket chain and other retailers impacted by the incident across the country were immediately worried that the incident was part of a hacker attack on their payment infrastructure. Michael Rochette, vice president at Spencer Technologies, a Northborough, Mass.-based technology installation and support company, said his firm heard last week from an East Coast supermarket chain that opened for business on Monday morning only to find all of their payment terminals unresponsive. We are working with our customers and distribution partners to track down where these terminals are and will provide whatever assistance we can to minimize any disruption as a result of this matter.”Īccording to two different merchants impacted by the incident that reached out to KrebsOnSecurity, the bricking of these payment terminals occurs only after the affected devices (in the 4x version of the terminals) are power-cycled or rebooted, which some merchants do daily. “Unfortunately, a subset of them can’t be fixed in the field which means they’ll need to be sent to our repair facility. “Many of these terminals have been successfully updated in the field,” Taylor said. The company is pointing affected customers who still need assistance to this certificate expiry help page. Taylor said Equinox is now working with customers, distributors and channel partners to replace the certificate to return terminals to an operational state.

“The certificate was created in 2004 with a 10 year expiry date.” “The security mechanism was triggered by the rollover of the date and not by any attack on or breach of the terminal,” said Stuart Taylor, vice president of payment solutions at Equinox. 7, 2014, certain older model payment terminals made by Hypercom stopped working due to the expiration of a cryptographic certificate used in the devices, according to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Equinox Payments, the company that owns the Hypercom brand.

Credit card terminal hypercom