Restaurants Sue Vendors After Point-of-sale Hack

When Keith Bond bought a computerized cash register system for his Broussard, Louisiana, restaurant, he thought he was modernizing his restaurant. Today, he believes he was unwittingly opening a back door for Romanian hackers who have now cost him more than US$50,000.

Bond's is one of more than a half-dozen Louisiana restaurants that have sued the makers of their point-of-sale system, alleging that the companies that made and resold the systems are the ones who should be responsible for fines levied by payment processors following the hack.

His story reads like a warning for small businesses, who in connecting their businesses to the Internet, have also become prey for sophisticated cyber-criminals.

Bond says that systems at his Mel's Diner, Part II, were hacked, along with several other restaurants in the region, sometime around March 2008. Investigators told him that the systems were compromised by Romanian hackers who used the devices' remote access software to steal credit card numbers from the systems. This software let Bond's reseller, Computer World, provide remote support to the systems. The criminals took those credit card numbers and then used them to make fraudulent purchases throughout the U.S., he said. pcworld