Crooks use brute force to hack payment cards

Tech Reporter

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A study recently released by NordVPN analysing four million payment cards from 140 countries finds that the most common method to hack the card is brute forcing. This type of attack is quick and can be executed in a few seconds.

Chief technology officer at NordVPN Marijus Briedis says the only way such a huge number of payment cards could appear on the dark web is through brute forcing.

“Criminals basically try to guess the card number and CVV. The first six to eight numbers are the card issuer’s ID number. That leaves hackers with seven to nine numbers to guess because the 16th digit is a checksum and is used only to determine whether any mistakes were made when entering the number. Using a computer this can take only six seconds,” Briedis says.

In a brute-force attack, a hacker uses a rapid trial-and-error approach to guess the correct password, PIN or payment card number. The attack requires time, computing power and a special type of software the criminals use.

Briedis says to guess the nine digits that are needed to have a full card number; a computer has to go through a billion combinations.

“It will only take one minute for a typical computer, which can try around 25 billion combinations per hour. However, depending on the card issuer, a criminal may need only seven digits to make a correct guess. In this case, six seconds would be enough,” he adds.

Most card issuers limit the number of guesses in a short space of time to prevent such attacks, but criminals find ways to get around the limitations. Mastercard has a centralised authentication system, so a criminal can only try around 10 times with one number before the system detects it. With the Visa security system, a criminal can try 30 to 40 times, and if they pick the right time of day, when it is really busy, they can try many more times because it has a decentralised federated system. This correlates with that more than a half (2 524 142) of the discovered payment cards were Visa, followed by Mastercard (1 602 248) and American Express (215 971).

Briedis says most important is to stay vigilant. “Review your monthly statement for suspicious activity and respond quickly to any notifications from your bank that your card may have been used in an unauthorised manner. Another recommendation is to have a separate bank account for different purposes and only keep small amounts of money in the one your payment cards are connected to. Some banks also offer temporary virtual cards you can use while shopping online.” Briedis says