Criminals guess card details ‘in six seconds’

Criminals can work out the card number, expiry date and security code for a Visa debit or credit card in as little as six seconds using guesswork, researchers have found.

Experts from Newcastle University said it was “frighteningly easy” to do with a laptop. Fraudsters use a so-called Distributed Guessing Attack to get around security features put in place to stop online fraud. Researchers found the system did not detect cyber criminals making multiple invalid attempts on websites in order to get payment card data.

According to a study published in the academic journal IEEE Security & Privacy, that meant fraudsters could use computers to systematically fire different variations of security data at hundreds of websites simultaneously.