Retailers Harassed by Backoff Malware

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last week sounded an alarm warning retailers of a family of malicious programs aimed at compromising point-of-sale systems. Attackers used such software last year in massive data breaches that nicked millions of consumer records at Target and Nieman Marcus. Variants of the Backoff family -- capable of scraping memory for credit card data, among other things -- have turned up in at least three forensic investigations, according to the department's Computer Emergency Response Team.