[phurley]

Not commenting directly on your assessment of the state of PoS systems, but how does a software vendor (not OS or sys admin) protect against targeted malware that is able to get access rights to your RAM space from scanning for well known track signatures?

I agree more can and should be done, but protecting against targeted malware by a sophisticated attacker is a very difficult problem. The amount of money at stake is large, so the resources expended by the attackers is also large.

Personally I believe that the current credit card system is broken and needs a significant change, but this is a very difficult process.