Pizza Madness
*This post will detail an account I had with a customer while working at the ISP*
We were alerted that a certain IP of ours was spitting out spam and malware traffic like crazy. When we pulled the connection history, all of their outbound traffic was port 25(SMTP) leaving the country. We located the client and attempted to contact them.
The first few calls were unsuccessful. After you leave a few messages and the staff says “the owner is not here right now, but I will leave this message” it smells of a small shop. I called later in the day and was finally able to reach the manager. I explained to him the traffic we were seeing and that he should contact his tech support.
I asked him about his setup and he said he had only one PC connected to our network with no router in between. All of our connections were bridged so that PC was full blown on the internet. He said it was an old windows 98 machine; to make matters worse! He then told me that this is his only POS(Point of Sale) machine and it handles all of his credit card transactions. What he told me next made my jaw drop; his IT support told him not to worry about the virus!
So we have a machine, spitting out tons of spam and stealing who knows how many credit cards and the guy he PAYS for support told him not to worry! His IT support told him not to worry about it because there is nothing he can do and even if he does fix it a problem will just show up again; viruses are everywhere!
I couldn’t believe what he told him. It took a lot of convincing to get the owner to even understand why this was such an issue. At the end of the day I still couldn’t get him to take it seriously and deal with the issue. We ended up turning off his internet connection to save his customers.
Always keep in mind when dealing with smaller merchants; they usually don’t have the money or training to even care about security for their credit card transactions. They are using software that *may* be secure and who knows if their computers are maintained.
If you see something fishy or if the staff is having a hard time with their computer; just pay cash!
