Finding PAX point-of-sale devices

PAX Technologies, a China-based company that manufactures a LOT of point-of-sale (POS) terminal devices, has been in the news this week following an FBI raid of a PAX Florida facility. While the FBI didn’t officially confirm much beyond serving a court-authorized search, a Krebs on Security post surfaces some serious security concerns around PAX device use in cybercrime attack operations. Specifically, that some PAX devices are being used in command-and-control (C2) operations during attacks and for hosting malware files. PAX has denied any knowledge of or involvement related to criminal activities involving its products (and point-of-sale devices and systems are well-known to be common targets for cybercriminals). Regardless, some large payment processors, such as Worldpay, started replacing their PAX point-of-sale terminals earlier this month after receiving inadequate explanation from PAX around traffic originating from their devices to websites that were not listed in PAX documentation.

PAX Technologies has not yet released any security advisories or other guidance related to these security concerns involving their point-of-sale terminals.

Finding PAX point-of-sale devices with Rumble

Most PAX point-of-sale devices don’t offer up any open UDP or TCP ports, which limits the datapoints we have for fingerprinting or identifying those assets. However, we can leverage the MAC address OUI (organizationally unique identifier) to identify PAX-manufactured devices. From the Asset Inventory, use the following pre-built query to locate PAX point-of-sale assets in your network:

mac_vendor:"PAX Computer Technology"

As always, any prebuilt queries we create are available from our Queries Library. Check out the library for other useful inventory queries.

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