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had not seen any material adverse changes to its In our payments ecosystem, when a member
operations or business, nor had it seen any cyberattacks gets hurt, we are all impacted. We have stood
perpetrated from PAX devices anywhere in the world. The
company affirmed it would continue to serve partners together against supply chain challenges and
and customers to the best of its ability, using high product natural and economic disasters. Why stop
standards. now, when one of our leading manufacturers
is under attack?
"The Company notes the KrebsOnSecurity Article
did not provide particulars of any such 'reports,'" PAX
representatives wrote. "It only referred to a second hand
hearsay quote from the 'source' of the writer that referred loyalty programs and telemetry data that reference a
to other unnamed sources that 'there is tech proof of the central processing unit’s memory usage and software
way that the terminals were used in attack ops.'" PAX update histories, they added.
noted these are unsubstantiated allegations.
"Therefore, depending on how consumer businesses (where
Get the facts right the Group’s payment terminals are typically deployed) are
operated and the configuration of communication of the
It may not be clear to payments industry outsiders, but POS applications with host, 'data packets' or 'network packets'
terminals have come a long way from auth and settlement. sizes can vary and be larger than what basic payment data
To my earlier point, there is more to POS terminals and would involve," wrote PAX Technology engineers.
their underpinning technologies than meets the eye. PAX
acknowledged this in its Oct. 29 statement, by attempting Until more facts come to light, all I am saying is give PAX
to explain the inner workings of their terminals. a chance.

Large data packets transmitted from PAX devices may
look suspicious to an untrained eye, but today's terminals Dale S. Laszig, senior staff writer at The Green Sheet and managing
transmit more than just payment data, PAX engineers director at DSL Direct LLC, is a payments industry journalist and content
explained. Terminals may also indicate geolocation, strategist. Connect via email dale@dsldirectllc.com, LinkedIn www.
linkedin.com/in/dalelaszig/ and Twitter @DSLdirect.