On Wed., June 13, Bit9 presented a Webinar titled “Protecting POS Systems: Kwik Trip Inc. Shares Their Experience.”
Bit9 stops advanced persistent threats by combining real-time sensors, cloud-based software reputation services, continuous monitoring and trust-based application control and whitelisting—eliminating the risk caused by malicious, illegal and unauthorized software.
Managing Data Threats
As data relevance grows, so does the administrative burden. C-stores have to contend with the escalating costs of compliance and increased pressure on administration to monitor more and more data. Meanwhile, different technologies covering compliance often lack integration capabilities and changing technologies, such as EMV, are leading to increased liability for merchants.
There can be gaps in PCI compliance that those looking to steal data are all too ready to take advantage of, such as at the point of transaction before encryption, or during holiday freezes, such as on Black Friday, when POS systems are overloaded and there are no patch updates to systems.
Bit9 Solution
La Crosse, Wis.-based Kwik Trip, with 425 locations in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa has been PCI compliant since 2005 and processes more than 9.5 million card transactions per month. Kwik Trip approached Bit9 in 2008. Today it has 1,422 POS endpoints all deployed with Bit9.
The company reviewed several options before deciding on Bit9’s Parity, which it found simple, effective and easy to administer.
Bit9 is currently running on all POS devices at Kwik Trip and has eliminated the software lag of a traditional anti-virus protection. It offers better protection against zero-day threats, noted Bruce Snyder from the IT Retail Systems team at Kwik Trip. Kwik Trip needed the downloading of protection to be light on the WAN. Other programs are required to constantly scan and update, which uses up the performance power of endpoints. But Bit9 eliminates that issue completely.
Initialization is a onetime download and is not required again. Bit9 Parity real-time Endpoint Sensor is a lightweight agent installed on each endpoint. Once installed, the agent uses less than 1% of the CPU processing power and less than 10MB of the available RAM.
“During initialization, it has to do a file scan of all the files in the system and it uses quite a bit of processing power and impacted POS function, but we were able to plan that for at night when the POS wasn’t in use,” said Jason Speropulos from the IT Retail Systems team at Kwik Trip.
“I consider Bit9 a model vendor and business partner,” added Snyder.“When the auditor first came when we added Bit9 and whitelisting, we had to prove back in 2008 that we could do better than traditional anti-virus, and they have now fully accepted it. Whitelisting is more popular today.”
Kwik Trip is looking to consider adding Bit9 in additional areas of its business going forward.
For More Information on Bit9 www.bit9.com