The recent cyberattacks that disrupted operations at major UK retailers like M&S and Co-op have sent a clear message to the entire hospitality and retail sector: infrastructure security isn’t optional. It’s foundational. When a breach can cost £4.3 million per week in lost sales, resilience stops being an IT issue — it becomes a board-level imperative.
At Kappture, security isn’t bolted on — it’s baked in. Our systems are engineered from the ground up to minimise attack surface, isolate vulnerabilities, and recover gracefully in the face of compromise. Unlike general-purpose consumer devices or open POS software stacks, our embedded, hardened platform — Kappture OS running on the K2 hardware — dramatically limits exposure.
Here’s how
The majority of modern POS systems are built on consumer-grade operating systems, running dozens of services, app stores, browsers, third-party integrations — and with them, a huge attack surface.
Kappture OS is not one of them. It’s a hardened Linux-based embedded OS running only the software required to deliver our application. No browser. No package manager. No app store. No unnecessary user accounts. No background services waiting to be exploited. Our total root filesystem is under 60MB. You don’t just reduce the chance of a successful attack — you remove entire categories of them.
Our system boots from a read-only, compressed file system (EROFS). This means even if someone were to gain local access, they cannot write to the OS, inject malware, or tamper with the binaries. In a world where attackers are constantly trying to implant persistent footholds in devices, a read-only system is a formidable barrier.
Factory reset is as simple as clearing the TPM. No downtime. No reimaging. No guesswork.
Typical systems boot through a chain of potentially vulnerable components — UEFI, bootloader, kernel — each of which can be tampered with.
Kappture’s UEFI firmware boots directly into a signed Linux kernel from the internal SSD. External boot is physically and digitally disabled. No USB booting. No PXE attacks. No CD-ROM exploits. It’s a closed loop.
Even with physical access to the hardware, it’s not possible to impersonate the platform or intercept sensitive data — the encryption keys are seeded in a TPM chip and cannot be extracted or moved.
Every K2 device runs Secure Boot with mandatory signature verification of the kernel. There is no option to disable it. If an attacker modifies the kernel, even slightly, the system will refuse to boot.
It’s a strict policy — and we enforce it because it works.
Some payment acquirers require platform-side middleware. Rather than opening up our OS to a spaghetti of third-party runtimes (Java, Mono, Node, etc.), we use read-only overlays to run only what’s needed, in isolation. The base system remains untouched — locked down, performant, secure.
Our team maintains an automated CVE audit pipeline — every OS release is scanned against the latest vulnerabilities from MITRE. We patch remotely exploitable vulnerabilities before release. Even local-only exploits are patched proactively when they exceed a CVSS score of 7.5 or present a significant risk.
Our clients don’t wait for a breach to find out they were exposed. They’re not exposed in the first place.
We don’t just say we’re secure — we prove it.
• ISO27001-aligned operational practices.
• PCI-DSS compliant transaction processing.
• Regular penetration testing conducted by third-party security firms.
• Audit logs, update tracking, and remote estate management tools that support real world security operations.
When you’re building technology for critical environments — high-volume retail, stadiums, hospitality — you can’t afford assumptions. And you can’t rely on generic platforms built for casual use.
The difference between a £4.3m outage and uninterrupted service often comes down to how the edge devices were built.
At Kappture, we build for resilience. We assume adversaries exist. We build our systems to be hard to reach, hard to tamper with, and fast to recover.
Security isn’t just a feature. It’s the architecture.
