VeriFone Teams with McAfee to Offer POS Anti-Virus Software

Responding to a year that has seen a steady barrage of viruses, worms, trojans, and other malicious computer attacks, VeriFone Inc. and McAfee Inc. announced today they will offer the first anti-virus software product to protect point-of-sale terminals linked to the Internet. The software will be available starting early next year for both current and prospective installations, and will offer real-time monitoring and attack-pattern update services based on McAfee's VirusScan product. The anti-virus protection will include both host and terminal components, and is intended to be an optional add-on for VeriFone devices running Internet Protocol (IP) connections, including wireless connections. The companies have not yet set pricing for the software, but they expect it will be “in line” with standard business pricing and licensing models for anti-virus solutions, the companies say. While VeriFone's IP-enabled point-of-sale terminals have “operated without intrusions,” says Paul Rasori, vice president of product marketing for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based terminal maker in a statement, “with the growth in [IP]-enabled payment devices, we want to provide merchants with assurance transaction data will be safe from increasingly sophisticated malicious software.” According to Celent Communicatiions, there are about 80,000 IP-connected POS terminals installed now, a number growing by the day. Celent forecasts there will be 250,000 by the end of next year. Merchants are increasingly drawn to the faster tender times available on IP-linked devices, which can shave 10 seconds off the typical 15-second transaction time of a dial-up terminal. At the same time, credit and debit card transactions now account for nearly one-third of total personal consumer expenditures in the U.S., “resulting in a heightened risk [that] wide scale virus assault on [POS] payment terminals could be devastating for impacted merchants,” the two companies say in a statement. VeriFone says it and McAfee, also based in Santa Clara, Calif., will work with transaction processors and independent sales organizations to install and support the anti-virus software. McAfee last year stuck an agreement with DoCoMo, a mobile-phone network operator in Japan, to offer anti-virus protection for IP-connected cell phones. The pace of malicious attacks on computer systems has accelerated in 2004 (“The Malware Menace,” Digital Transactions, March/April). The number of malicious incidents soared 67% last year, to 137,529, according to the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. This year, the swarm of attacks has grown so numerous that CERT no longer tracks separate incidents. Various forms of malware spread rapidly on the Internet, and can compromise the performance of vulnerable, IP-connected machines as well as any data they transmit.