US Computer Emergency Response Team, in cooperation with the Secret Service and researchers at Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, have issued an alert about a newly identified variant of malware installed on point-of-sale (POS) systems that was used in a series of recent attacks by cyber criminals. Called “Backoff,” the malware shares characteristics with the one used to attack Target’s point of sale systems last year: it scrapes credit card data out of the infected computer’s memory. Until now, it was undetectable by antivirus software. POS machines are a big target for hackers, who use malware like Backoff to collect data from credit cards and other transaction information to either create fraudulent credit cards or sell the data. In many ways, the Backoff-based attacks were similar to the attack in 2011 on Subway franchises.