The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers Read Online Free PDF
Author: Kevin D. Mitnick
excitement to "knowing you're smarter than some- body and you can beat them. And that, in our case, it was gonna make us some money."
They went shopping and found a Casio wristwatch with a countdown feature that could be set to tenths of a second; they bought three, one for each of the guys who would be going to the casinos; Larry would be staying behind to man the computer.
They were ready to start testing their method. One of the team would begin to play and would call out the hand he got -- the denomination and suit of each of the five cards. Larry would enter the data into their 8 The Art of Intrusion
own computer; though something of an off-brand, it was a type popular with nerds and computer buffs, and great for the purpose because it had a much faster chip than the one in the Japanese video poker machine. It took only moments to calculate the exact time to set into one of the Casio countdown timers.
When the timer went off, the guy at the slot machine would hit the Play button. But this had to be done accurately to within a fraction of a second. Not as much of a problem as it might seem, as Alex explained:
Two of us had spent some time as musicians. If you're a musician
and you have a reasonable sense of rhythm, you can hit a button
within plus or minus five milliseconds.
If everything worked the way it was supposed to, the machine would display the sought-after royal flush. They tried it on their own machine, practicing until all of them could hit the royal flush on a decent percent- age of their tries.
Over the previous months, they had, in Mike's words, "reverse engi- neering the operation of the machine, learned precisely how the random numbers were turned into cards on the screen, precisely when and how fast the RNG iterated, all of the relevant idiosyncrasies of the machine, and developed a program to take all of these variables into consideration so that once we know the state of a particular machine at an exact instant in time, we could predict with high accuracy the exact iteration of the RNG at any time within the next few hours or even days."
They had defeated the machine -- turned it into their slave. They had taken on a hacker's intellectual challenge and had succeeded. The knowl- edge could make them rich.
It was fun to daydream about. Could they really bring it off in the jun- gle of a casino?
Back to the Casinos -- This Time to Play It's one thing to fiddle around on your own machine in a private, safe location. Trying to sit in the middle of a bustling casino and steal their money -- that's another story altogether. That takes nerves of steel.
Their ladies thought the trip was a lark. The guys encouraged tight skirts and flamboyant behavior -- gambling, chatting, giggling, ordering drinks -- hoping the staff in the security booth manning the "Eye in the Sky" cameras would be distracted by pretty faces and a show of flesh. "So we pushed that as much as possible," Alex remembers. Chapter 1 Hacking the Casinos for a Million Bucks 9
The hope was that they could just fit in, blending with the crowd. "Mike was the best at it. He was sort of balding. He and his wife just looked like typical players."
Alex describes the scene as if it had all happened yesterday. Marco and Mike probably did it a little differently, but this is how it worked for Alex: With his wife Annie, he would first scout a casino and pick out one video poker machine. He needed to know with great precision the exact cycle time of the machine. One method they used involved stuffing a video camera into a shoulder bag; at the casino, the player would position the bag so the camera lens was pointing at the screen of the video poker machine, and then he would run the camera for a while. "It could be tricky," he remembers, "trying to hoist the bag into exactly the right position without looking like the position really mattered. You just don't want to do anything that looks suspicious and draws attention." Mike
They went shopping and found a Casio wristwatch with a countdown feature that could be set to tenths of a second; they bought three, one for each of the guys who would be going to the casinos; Larry would be staying behind to man the computer.
They were ready to start testing their method. One of the team would begin to play and would call out the hand he got -- the denomination and suit of each of the five cards. Larry would enter the data into their 8 The Art of Intrusion
own computer; though something of an off-brand, it was a type popular with nerds and computer buffs, and great for the purpose because it had a much faster chip than the one in the Japanese video poker machine. It took only moments to calculate the exact time to set into one of the Casio countdown timers.
When the timer went off, the guy at the slot machine would hit the Play button. But this had to be done accurately to within a fraction of a second. Not as much of a problem as it might seem, as Alex explained:
Two of us had spent some time as musicians. If you're a musician
and you have a reasonable sense of rhythm, you can hit a button
within plus or minus five milliseconds.
If everything worked the way it was supposed to, the machine would display the sought-after royal flush. They tried it on their own machine, practicing until all of them could hit the royal flush on a decent percent- age of their tries.
Over the previous months, they had, in Mike's words, "reverse engi- neering the operation of the machine, learned precisely how the random numbers were turned into cards on the screen, precisely when and how fast the RNG iterated, all of the relevant idiosyncrasies of the machine, and developed a program to take all of these variables into consideration so that once we know the state of a particular machine at an exact instant in time, we could predict with high accuracy the exact iteration of the RNG at any time within the next few hours or even days."
They had defeated the machine -- turned it into their slave. They had taken on a hacker's intellectual challenge and had succeeded. The knowl- edge could make them rich.
It was fun to daydream about. Could they really bring it off in the jun- gle of a casino?
Back to the Casinos -- This Time to Play It's one thing to fiddle around on your own machine in a private, safe location. Trying to sit in the middle of a bustling casino and steal their money -- that's another story altogether. That takes nerves of steel.
Their ladies thought the trip was a lark. The guys encouraged tight skirts and flamboyant behavior -- gambling, chatting, giggling, ordering drinks -- hoping the staff in the security booth manning the "Eye in the Sky" cameras would be distracted by pretty faces and a show of flesh. "So we pushed that as much as possible," Alex remembers. Chapter 1 Hacking the Casinos for a Million Bucks 9
The hope was that they could just fit in, blending with the crowd. "Mike was the best at it. He was sort of balding. He and his wife just looked like typical players."
Alex describes the scene as if it had all happened yesterday. Marco and Mike probably did it a little differently, but this is how it worked for Alex: With his wife Annie, he would first scout a casino and pick out one video poker machine. He needed to know with great precision the exact cycle time of the machine. One method they used involved stuffing a video camera into a shoulder bag; at the casino, the player would position the bag so the camera lens was pointing at the screen of the video poker machine, and then he would run the camera for a while. "It could be tricky," he remembers, "trying to hoist the bag into exactly the right position without looking like the position really mattered. You just don't want to do anything that looks suspicious and draws attention." Mike
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