Feb 242009
I elected to pay my dues to SWITCH.CH by credit card and got redirected to this:
Now I have a credit card from UBS, I’m paying SWITCH and I end up at CARCENTER.CH on what looks like a teenage-hacker effort?
Believe it or not, this is indeed UBS’s implementation of 3D-Secure, which as you can read in that Wikipedia article, seems to be less than perfect. Amusingly, returning to the same URL I get this:
which pretty well says it all. With all the other snafus the bank has been accumulating, one wonders how long it can go on…
Blame VISA for it, UBS has nothing to do with it. This is also the reason for this “cardcenter.ch” redirection. There are several research papers out there about this topic, e.g.: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/fc10vbvsecurecode.pdf