Are you feeling safe using your credit card? A research team from the UK was able to crack a credit card, including dates and security codes, in as little as six seconds.

According to a press release, the researcher used a “Distributed Guessing Attack” which uses a online payment website. The method is used to guess the data and the reply to the transaction.

Researchers were able to use this method to gather expiration dates and security codes because current online payment systems don’t detect multiple invalid payment requests. With this method, the researchers were able to try an unlimited amount of guesses on each website.

The researchers posit that this method may have been used by the hackers of the recent Tesco cyberattacks which resulted in the exposed data of 9,000 accounts and resulted in the theft of £2.5 million ($3.1 million).

Newcastle University's School of Computing Science PhD student Mohammed Ali said: “This sort of attack exploits two weaknesses that on their own are not too severe but when used together, present a serious risk to the whole payment system.”

Source: SCMagazine