An Issue You Will Need to Deal With Sooner Than Later – Microsoft Windows XP Embedded‘s End of Life is in January.

XP Embedded, the workhorse of the modern Point of Sale age is going away.  After a more than 14 year run, extended support for the product is ending.  The reason?  Vulnerabilities in older encryption protocols such as TLS 1 will no longer be supported by Microsoft as they cannot get them to new standards on Windows XP based operating systems.  This will essentially render all systems with the XP operating system to be non-PCI compliant effective January 13, 2016.

Included in this group are:

• Microsoft Windows Embedded XP

Not updating your POS system to a compliant operating system will put your POS environment in violation of PCI compliance in at least 3 areas (quoted from PCI DSS v3: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS_v3-1.pdf):

• “6.2 Ensure that all system components and software are protected from known vulnerabilities by installing applicable vendor-supplied security patches.”
• “11.2.1 Perform quarterly internal vulnerability scans and rescans as needed, until all “high-risk” vulnerabilities (as identified in Requirement 6.1) are resolved.”
• “11.3.3 Exploitable vulnerabilities found during penetration testing are corrected and testing is repeated to verify the corrections

This means if you are running a POS system with Windows XP, you have to do something now.   Please contact us (http://www.rdspos.com) for an assessment on if your environment is at risk.

By Patrick Solum

RDS Southeast has about 20 restaurant customers in the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Recently, we invited one of our restaurant group customers to install Restaurant Guard by NCR Hosted Solutions. With Restaurant Guard installed for only two weeks, yesterday we were told that our customer had caught three employees stealing red-handed and fired them!

Two employees immediately confessed and the third denied the charges but RG reports and video surveillance confirmed all three were thieves.  Police escorted the three out of the airport and charges are pending.

The scam the thieves were using was the “Reprint” scam. When a guest would order a common menu item like “Combo Number Two” and pay cash, the employees would reprint several copies of the receipt. Then, whenever another guest would come along later and order the same menu item the cashier would ring in the sale and hand the guest the pre-printed receipt. After the guest paid and walked away with their food, the cashier would simply clear/delete the items on the ticket without ever completing the sale. The $8.00 cash would go right in the cashier’s pocket!

Here’s the Astronomical effect of this “petty” theft:

Combo meal price:          $8.00

Reprint Scam if used only 5 times a day = ($8 x 5 times a day) = $40 a day

20 restaurants in the airport. Be conservative and say it only happens in half of them…

10 restaurants = ($40 a day x 10 restaurants) = $400 a day

7 days a week= (7 days x $400) = $2,800 a week

50 weeks a year = (50 weeks x $2,800) = $140,000 a year!!!!!    This restaurant group was losing over $140,000 in revenue a year to theft!
Restaurant Guard Price: $125 a month per location x 10 stores = $1,250 a month

$1,250 a month (10 stores) x 12 months = $15,000 a year.

Pay $15,000 a year to get $140,000 increase in sales? Not a bad investment! Remember also, this was just one scam caught. It may be just “the-tip-of-the-iceberg”.

The other employees saw the police lead the thieves away in handcuffs. What effect will that have to stopping other theft?

The moral of this real-life experience is that RDS is our customer’s friend and consultant. Don’t be shy about asking about and listening to what worries our customers the most. It’s often not about being high-tech, email marketing, tablets or new social media apps. It’s about cutting their costs, improving their profits and making their quality of life better!

We have some of the best people in the industry around us. Bring them with you when you visit your friends (customers) and you will be successful! Good Selling!