S21sec, an industry-leading company specialized in cybersecurity, has announced that it has collaborated again this year with the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) of Europol through high-level training sessions on security in banking payment systems held last week –from 11 to 15 July– in Avila (Spain).

The National Police Academy has welcomed over 60 experts from across Europe with the aim of increasing their knowledge about attacks and threats targeting different banking means of payment. The training sessions have addressed issues from forensics Skimming devices (used for banking attacks and information theft), to malware at ATM or POS terminals, research on the latest carding and banking techniques, etc.

The S21sec engineering team gave specific training on "How to Purchase and classify malware from scratch", which deepened in all steps and aspects required, including topics such as malware classification (crawling), deployment of infrastructure to deploy analysis environments and labs integration with third-party products.

“We have worked with specific samples of POS malware ready to infect both POS and ATM terminals. The goal of the training was to provide attendees with a comprehensive and functional overview on processes that allowed them to learn in practice how to perform a thorough analysis of these threats", said the S21sec trainers.

"Today, means of payment are a recurring target for cybercriminals, so we believe it is essential to promote understanding of different attack techniques, the most frequent threats and the best practices to face them," stressed Xabier Mitxelena, CEO of S21sec. "Initiatives like this led by Europol deserve our full support, and we are really pleased to collaborate in spreading the culture of cybersecurity among experts, researchers and trainers from all over Europe".