

Cracking the credit card code - karol_zielinski
http://blog.paylane.com/cracking-the-credit-card-code

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asymptotic
...there's nothing to crack here, so I find the title misleading. I would find
articles such as "Cracking the ISBN code" or "Cracking the CRC32 code" equally
misleading.

To me, cracking implies breaking through a barrier intended to be opaque.
Hence, Ross Anderson's paper on an attack on the hardware security modules in
ATM machines to brute force a PIN for a given account in less than the full
PIN space is, truly, an example of cracking:

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf>

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leek
Original link/source: <http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/credit-card-
code-01202011>

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spjwebster
Back in the day, when processing payments for online transactions cost the
earth and pre-auth was but a twinkle in the eye of the bank API developers,
knowledge of the Luhn algorithm allowed one to test services via their free
trials without having to give up one's credit card number. These days it's
only useful as a pre-pre-auth sanity check.

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unwantedLetters
The article mentions and informally describes the Luhn algorithm which is
fairly interesting.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm>

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imrans
Why should anyone do this it is against the law.

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corin_
What on earth are you talking about?

