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Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

independent.co.uk

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. I have an AMEX in my wallet and it does not have any codes on the back, nor have I ever been asked for one.

It does - there is a 3 digit number on the back in the signature strip. The Amex website will ask you for it if you attempt to change your phone number, amongst other similar high-risk transactions.

I have been asked the 3 digit code when booking an airline ticket on a non-US site. During payment it passed through a amex safekey site which I think is kind of like 3d secure

http://security.stackexchange.com/a/136296

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. I have an AMEX in my wallet and it does not have any codes on the back, nor have I ever been asked for one.

It does - there is a 3 digit number on the back in the signature strip. The Amex website will ask you for it if you attempt to change your phone number, amongst other similar high-risk transactions.

[deleted]

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For AMEX, there's still a 3 digit CSC code on the back which you will need from time to time. The 4 digit code on the front is their CID, asked for by most merchants.

Citation needed. I have an AMEX in my wallet and it does not have any codes on the back, nor have I ever been asked for one.

[deleted]

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#114
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I designed the fraud prevention for a major ecommerce site(PCI Level 1). We used to get hit with lots of card testing including bot nets. They are easily mitigated. First thing is detune your error messages. Combine all the errors into one generic message. This includes AVS, CVN, and Expiration. I've see so many sites return the raw message back from the processor. We also actively black holed large blocks IP address…

Regarding error messages: At a previous gig, we had to aggressively and repeatedly fight the business side who thought that vague credit card error messages were a large source of user confusion. Eventually, we won but it was certainly an eye-opening moment for the developers involved to even have to fight that battle.

As a programmer, I get it, but as a user there's been a few times where I fat-fingered a number or an address and the payment failed - it was then a minor PITA to figure out exactly what I got wrong.

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#115
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost none of the American sites supported it There's just not much incentive to support it. You have to make it optional, otherwise your conversion rate drops like a rock. And, if you make it optional, only a very tiny amount of customers ever use it...and the ones that do are VERY unlikely to be fraudulent users. Thus, the shift in liability isn't really an incentive. The only way it would work would be to make i…

The actual way you do it in reality is to trigger it for a small percentage of high risk transactions. My company uses Ravelin for this - we feed them lots of data, they do some kind of machine learning, and they feed us back a recommendation. Depending on what recommendation we receive, we either let the transaction through without 3DS, block it completely, or only allow it with 3DS.

I assume though, that you're still losing some number of conversions to legitimate customers that don't want to deal with 3DS.

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#116
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transaction processors also face fines if the dispute percentage is too high. They don't have forbidden business lists just because they don't like pornography or sex toys. They can also be defrauded by merchants too: Make a fake business, make some fake purchases to yourself and after you get your money, disappear. Then a financial institution is the one holding the bag. That said, it's absolutely true that an onlin…

> They don't have forbidden business lists just because they don't like pornography or sex toys. Those are "high-risk" mainly because of "reputational risk", not because of chargebacks. Which I imagine is code for Visa or the banks thinking "If too many people with traditional morals get into political office, they'll start cracking down on us if we do business with the sex toy companies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

> Those are "high-risk" mainly because of "reputational risk", not because of chargebacks.

This may be partially true, but I'd imagine they still see a higher rate of chargebacks. "What's this on the credit card bill, honey?" "Porn?! Someone must have hacked my intertubes!"

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#117
post #5

These attackers are probably brilliant enough to make their mark in the honest tech business world. I suppose they are driven by the challenge of the crime.

There are only a very few places in the world where you can get good jobs in tech: SV & NY... If you're not American, you're screwed because you can't get to America legally. That leaves fraud as a very serious make-a-living option =)

SV and NY are not the best places to go once you consider quality of life. Better choices:

    San Antonio, TX
    Provo, UT
    Huntsville, AL
    Melbourne, FL
    Nashua, NH
    Salt Lake City, UT
    Charleston, SC
    Arlington, VA
    Alexandria, VA
    Wichita, KS
These are places with greater freedom. Most of them are less crowded and less expensive, usually by a huge amount.

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#118
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I designed the fraud prevention for a major ecommerce site(PCI Level 1). We used to get hit with lots of card testing including bot nets. They are easily mitigated. First thing is detune your error messages. Combine all the errors into one generic message. This includes AVS, CVN, and Expiration. I've see so many sites return the raw message back from the processor. We also actively black holed large blocks IP address…

Regarding error messages: At a previous gig, we had to aggressively and repeatedly fight the business side who thought that vague credit card error messages were a large source of user confusion. Eventually, we won but it was certainly an eye-opening moment for the developers involved to even have to fight that battle.

Score your users based on attributes like whats in cart, IP reputation, browser/os, pages visited, source,3rd party fraud detecton providers etc. Score should reflect how likely the user is genuine or not. For well scoring users which should be 90% of your traffic, provide them with detailed messages.

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#119

I'm no means on expert on this, but having delt a little with online transactions from testing responses from a payment processor. The things that needed to match also involved the customers street address, zip and name. If I recall these were scored and if the match wasn't good (zip was entered wrong) the transaction was rejected. Maybe different payment processors have different thresholds for rejecting a transacti…

That's entirely up to the merchant, not the processor (or the gateway, either of the banks, or any of the other middlemen). From the link you gave "You will need to log into your payment gateway website and adjust these settings as you learn your customer profile and behavior." Most merchants want to sell things, and don't want to constantly field complaints from customers (or bad word of mouth from lost customers), so they set them to rather loose settings.

The fraud checks go through many middlemen each with their own systems, with their own bugs and limitations. Any programmer could guess a few. If the address is "apt 2, 300 main street" entered as "300 main st, apt 2" (or vice-versa), it can fail. If the zip code is 9-digits entered as 5 (or vice-versa), it could fail. Of course, the customer doesn't know exactly what pattern the system is looking for. If the punctuation is different, it might fail. If there are unexpected characters or encodings that any system or network in the chain can't handle properly, it might fail. If any of the systems is in a different country from any of the others, it might fail. In fact, AVS doesn't work in most countries (or at least didn't, last time I checked.) The internet brings international customers, but the payment systems aren't really internationalized.

So the question becomes, do we tighten this down to try to reduce fraud at the cost of losing 2/3rds of our regular repeat customers and limiting ourselves to only U.S. customers? Unless the cost of fraudulent transactions regularly exceeds 2/3rds of your revenue and you're intentionally a U.S.-only business, probably not. Companies would rather ignore AVS and expiration date failures than go out of business.

Re: Criminals can guess Visa number and security code in six seconds, experts find

#120
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't have forbidden business lists just because they don't like pornography or sex toys. Those are "high-risk" mainly because of "reputational risk", not because of chargebacks. Which I imagine is code for Visa or the banks thinking "If too many people with traditional morals get into political office, they'll start cracking down on us if we do business with the sex toy companies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

ACH still has chargebacks. For up to six months after the debit, no less.

Fun aside. In the UK the Bacs system (similar to ACH) has no time limit on chargebacks (called indemnity claims). So you could do an indemnity claim there 10 years after the debit.
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