Card cracking is another type for carding fraud, and is a form of fraud where consumers are scammed by an online solicitation and provide the details for a debit card for the withdrawal of fake deposits.

Card information can be stolen in various ways. Physically, skimmers can be used on ATMs which steal information from the machines in which they have been installed. It can also be stolen by using a carding bot, through phishing scams, or even by purchasing the information on carder forums.

The brute force nature of a credit card cracking attack often results in its being mistakenly identified as a DDoS attack, as they generate thousands of requests per second whilst attackers attempt to validate card details. This leads to businesses paying to scale the resources needed to keep the website and payment gateway open to real customers.

There is both a direct and indirect cost to businesses associated with carding fraud. Not only does the activity force businesses to impose rate limiting, additional customer challenges or issue fines for increased levels of fraud, but continual fraudulent activity can lead to significant reputational damage.

Following a successful carding attack, the business may be left with chargebacks from the payment provider for successfully cracked cards and expensive investigations. In extreme cases, an organization may lose their ability to process payments due to the high levels of fraud associated with their business.

Stolen credit card data is a valuable commodity, and methods for obtaining it are becoming increasingly sophisticated to ensure continued success. In some cases, attackers will place random items in a cart to appear more like real users, or combine web scraping, account takeover attacks and carding to make it impossible to identify the attack using traditional analysis. At Netacea, we use our Intent Analytics™ platform, powered by machine learning technology, to analyze millions of requests, signals and patterns and identify automated attacks in real-time.

Our Intent Analytics™ Engine allows you to shut down automated carding attacks and protect your business with incredible speed and accuracy

We’ve developed a revolutionary solution that goes beyond static rules or simple behavioral checks. Instead, our algorithm constantly analyzes your web traffic to detect sophisticated evasion techniques. This allows you to have constant visibility and control over the attack, so that you can prioritize real transactions and block the automated abuse.