14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, InterCrawler revealed the identity of a 17-year-old teen from Russia who was allegedly responsible for the creation of the malware used in the Target attack.
After further analysis, the company has determined that the teen, Sergey Taraspov, is in charge for technical support and that the real developer is actually one Rinat Shabayev.
In an interview with Russian publication LifeNews, Shabayev, who lives in the city of Saratov, has admitted developing the application that has been dubbed BlackPOS and Kaptoxa.
However, the 23-year-old says that his creation is not intended for criminal purposes. He claims to have written the program for security testing. On the other hand, he does admit that it can be used for malicious purposes.
Shabayev has allegedly developed the malware in collaboration with another individual whom he had met online. He doesn’t know anything about his real identity, not even the country in which he lives.
The programmer says he never meant to use the application. Instead, he just intended to sell it and let others decide what they wanted to do with it.
He also clarified that he took readily available software and only wrote an addition to it. Once the work was done, he gave it to his partner.
Experts say the malware has been sold to various cybercriminal groups from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. One of the operations in which the threat has been used is the one aimed at Target.
It’s possible that BlackPOS has also been utilized to steal the payment card details of Neiman Marcus customers.
In the Target breach, 40 million payment cards have been compromised. The data is being sold on underground markets and is already being misused for fraudulent purchases.