Wednesday, 7 December 2016

A new tool to guess your credit card details in just 6 seconds

Researchers found out that a specially designed toolkit can get a Visa card’s secure code within six seconds only. Do you ever think while shopping online that your credit card is safe? Well, it is not much easier for hackers to get your card details. A research by the University of Newcastle suggests that there is a big flaw in the security features of credit cards which make it easier for cyber criminals to attain important data. They have found out that if hackers guess the card’s CVC number which are put on various websites, then the security systems of the credit card are not triggered as expected and the user will not get a notification of any kind of fraud activities that might be working its way. Researchers found out that a specially designed toolkit can get a card’s secure code within six seconds only.
The software builds up data by gathering information from guessed across various websites and compiles a list of information like the card holder’s address, expiry date and CVC. It has been rumoured that the same method was used in the Tesco bank incident where 20 thousand accounts got drained of money, earlier in December. As of now, it has been found that only Visa cards are vulnerable to such security attacks as other cards like MasterCar already track the person efforts in guessing on various websites. The Visa world is not set up well enough to act on that many websites.
Visa was informed by the researchers’ team before they published the paper in IEEE Security and Privacy 2017. But Visa has not taken it seriously, and told The Independent that the research did not take into consideration the various methods the company uses to prevent frauds in the payment system, which it said was important to cross by anybody before making the transaction on any website.
With mobile banking and payment system growing in popularity, it remains to be seen how long it will be that plastic cards go extinct, especially after such reports of ease of fraud making people wary of using them. Even though such systems are not available globally, but the sooner we move to a cashless and cardless world it would be better and safer.The problem is that we’re not moving to a cardless world quickly enough. Systems like Apple Pay and Android Wallet aren’t available globally, and it would take some time before the technology eventually becomes available to everyone. As long as we continue to rely on the credit card system, it’s likely we’ll be experiencing security breaches like the one at Tesco Bank for a long time to come.

 

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