Target, Neiman Marcus Malware Creators Identified

Eastern European team developed memory-scraping Kaptoxa (BlackPOS) malware, sold it at least 40 times, says cyber-intelligence firm

Dark Reading Staff

Dark Reading

January 21, 2014

A team of at least two developers created the point-of-sale malware used to hack Target, Neiman Marcus, and likely other retailers in the United States, Australia, and Canada.

So said information security intelligence firm IntelCrawler Friday in a report that named a 17-year-old Russian teenager, who used the online handle "ree[4]" (a.k.a. ree4), suspected of being the author of the BlackPOS -- for point-of-sale -- malware. The malware is also known as Kaptoxa, or "potato" in Russian.

But security journalist Brian Krebs, who broke the news of the Target breach in December, questioned IntelCrawler's findings. Subsequently, the intelligence firm updated its research, naming instead a second teenage suspect, who it said shared the ree4 handle with the first suspect. "Intelcrawler apparently just changed its mind about the guy responsible for the Target POS malware," Krebs tweeted Monday. "Now they have the right guy."

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