Thieves can guess Visa card details in seconds

[Anonymous]

Can't believe how easy this is. More reason to use a service like Android or Apple Pay where your card number isn't used or visible during a transaction.

Ars Technica - Thieves can guess Visa card details in seconds

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Thieves can guess your secret Visa payment card data in as little as six seconds, according to researchers at Newcastle University in the UK. Bad actors can use browser bots to distribute guesses across hundreds of legitimate online merchants.

The attack starts out with a card's 16-digit number, which can be obtained in a variety of ways.

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[Anonymous]

"Surprisingly, Visa—the world's biggest payment card service—didn't employ any system-wide mechanism for detecting the mass guessing attack. The Newcastle University researchers said that Visa competitor MasterCard, on the other hand, did detect the distributed mass guesses and shut down the attacks before they could succeed.

"The findings provide another good reason for people to closely scrutinize credit card bills each month for fraudulent purchases. It's also a good idea to use a single non-Visa credit card for all online purchases and to keep the spending limit on that card as low as possible."