Researchers from the prominent UK’s Newcastle University claims that it takes as little as 6 seconds to them to hack any credit or debit card number, expiry date and security code, say scientists who were able to circumvent all security features meant to protect online payments from fraud.

The University researchers further stated the flaws in the VISA payment system, found neither the network nor the banks were able to detect attackers making multiple, invalid attempts to get payment card data.

Following the automatical and systematical generation of different variations of the cards security data and firing it at multiple websites, within seconds hackers are able to get a ‘hit’ and verify all the necessary security data. Investigators believe this guessing attack method is likely to have been used in the recent Tesco cyberattack which the Newcastle team describe as “frighteningly easy if you have a laptop and an internet connection.”

“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,” said Mohammed Ali, a Ph.D. student at Newcastle University.

“Firstly, the current online payment system does not detect multiple invalid payment requests from different websites,” said Ali. “This allows unlimited guesses on each card data field, using up to the allowed number of attempts—typically 10 or 20 guesses—on each website,” he said.

“Secondly, different websites ask for different variations in the card data fields to validate an online purchase. This means it’s quite easy to build up the information and piece it together like a jigsaw,” Ali said. “The unlimited guesses, when combined with the variations in the payment data fields make it frighteningly easy for attackers to generate all the card details one field at a time,” he said.

“Each generated card field can be used in succession to generate the next field and so on,” Ali said. “If the hits are spread across enough websites then a positive response to each question can be received within two seconds—just like any online payment,” he said.

“So even starting with no details at all other than the first six digits—which tell you the bank and card type and so are the same for every card from a single provider—a hacker can obtain the three essential pieces of information to make an online purchase within as little as six seconds,” he said.

The researchers further told that the hacking can be sone easily working through the online payment websites, where the networks didn’t check the multiple payments and gateways.

The team found that it was only the VISA network that was endangered. The research was published in the academic journal IEEE Security and Privacy.