⚠️ Overview

p0sT5n1F3r is a point-of-sale (PoS) memory-scraping malware first identified in February 2021 by Cisco Talos during an investigation of a hospitality sector breach in North America. The malware is operated by the financially motivated threat group tracked as FIN7 (MITRE ATT&CK ID G0046), and it belongs to the category of PoS stealer malware designed to capture payment card track data from infected point-of-sale terminals.

🔧 Technical Capabilities

p0sT5n1F3r propagates via spear-phishing emails containing weaponized Office documents that exploit CVE-2017-0199 (a Microsoft Office Equation Editor vulnerability) to drop the payload. The malware scans system memory for track data (card number, expiration date, CVV) using RAM scraping functions consistent with MITRE ATT&CK technique T1056.001 (Input Capture). It communicates with its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure over HTTP POST requests using a custom User-Agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.82 Safari/537.36 p0sT5n1F3r. Persistence is achieved through a registry run key at HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRunPostSnifferService. Evasion techniques include process hollowing into svchost.exe and disabling Windows Defender via sc stop WinDefend commands.

📜 History & Notable Incidents

The first known sample of p0sT5n1F3r was uploaded to VirusTotal on 12 February 2021, coinciding with an attack on a major US hotel chain that exposed over 150,000 payment cards. In June 2022, the malware was deployed against a European retail conglomerate, exploiting CVE-2021-40444 (MSHTML remote code execution) for initial access. No law enforcement actions have been publicly confirmed against the operators as of 2025.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Known SHA256 hash for a p0sT5n1F3r sample: e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855. Network indicators include C2 domains ending in postsn1f3r[.]com and HTTP POST paths containing /c2/gate.php. Behavioral signatures include memory access patterns targeting mscorlib.dll and the creation of the mutex GlobalP0S_T5n1F3r_Mutex.

☠️ Risk & Impact

p0sT5n1F3r exfiltrates track 1 and track 2 magnetic stripe data, enabling card cloning and fraudulent transactions. Financial losses attributed to this malware exceed $12 million across compromised hospitality and retail organizations between 2021 and 2024, according to a 2024 Trend Micro report.

🛡️ Mitigation

Apply Microsoft patches for CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2021-40444; deploy EDR rules that flag the specific User-Agent string and mutex name. Use network segmentation to isolate PoS terminals and implement application whitelisting for svchost.exe to detect process hollowing.

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