Hacking a Video Poker Machine
Kevin Poulsen has written an interesting story about two people who successfully exploited a bug in a popular video poker machine.
Entries Tagged "gambling"
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Consumer Manipulation
Tim Harford talks about consumer manipulation:
Consider, first, confusion by design: Las Vegas casinos are mazes, carefully crafted to draw players to the slot machines and to keep them there. Casino designers warn against the “yellow brick road” effect of having a clear route through the casino. (One side effect: it takes paramedics a long time to find gamblers in cardiac arrest; as Ms Schüll also documents, it can be tough to get the slot-machine players to assist, or even to make room for, the medical team.)
Most mazes in our economy are metaphorical: the confusion of multi-part tariffs for mobile phones, cable television or electricity. My phone company regularly contacts me to assure me that I am on the cheapest possible plan given my patterns of usage. No doubt this claim can be justified on some narrow technicality but it seems calculated to deceive. Every time I have put it to the test it has proved false.
I recently cancelled a contract with a different provider after some gizmo broke. The company first told me the whole thing was my problem, then at the last moment offered me hundreds of pounds to stay. When your phone company starts using the playbook of an emotionally abusive spouse, this is not a market in good working order.
This is a security story: manipulation vs. manipulation defense. One of my worries about our modern market system is that the manipulators have gotten too good. We need better security—either technical defenses or legal prohibitions—against this manipulation.
EDITED TO ADD (1/23): More about how cellphone companies rip you off.
Attacking Online Poker Players
This story is about how at least two professional online poker players had their hotel rooms broken into and their computers infected with malware.
I agree with the conclusion:
So, what’s the moral of the story? If you have a laptop that is used to move large amounts of money, take good care of it. Lock the keyboard when you step away. Put it in a safe when you’re not around it, and encrypt the disk to prevent off-line access. Don’t surf the web with it (use another laptop/device for that, they’re relatively cheap). This advice is true whether you’re a poker pro using a laptop for gaming or a business controller in a large company using the computer for wiring a large amount of funds.
Bizarre Online Gambling Movie-Plot Threat
This article argues that online gambling is a strategic national threat because terrorists could use it to launder money.
The Harper demonstration showed the technology and techniques that terror and crime organizations could use to operate untraceable money laundering built on a highly liquid legalized online poker industry—just the environment that will result from the spread of poker online.
[…]
A single poker game takes just a few hours to transfer $5 million as was recently demonstrated—legally—by American player Brian Hastings with his Swedish competitor half a world away. An established al-Qaida poker network could extract from the United States enough untraceable money in six days to fund an operation like the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
I’m impressed with the massive fear resonating in this essay.
Fixing Soccer Matches
How international soccer matches are fixed.
Right now, Dan Tan’s programmers are busy reverse-engineering the safeguards of online betting houses. About $3 billion is wagered on sports every day, most of it on soccer, most of it in Asia. That’s a lot of noise on the big exchanges. We can exploit the fluctuations, rig the bets in a way that won’t trip the houses’ alarms. And there are so many moments in a soccer game that could swing either way. All you have to do is see an Ilves tackle in the box where maybe the Viikingit forward took a dive. It happens all the time. It would happen anyway. So while you’re running around the pitch in Finland, the syndicate will have computers placing high-volume max bets on whatever outcome the bosses decided on, using markets in Manila that take bets during games, timing the surges so the security bots don’t spot anything suspicious. The exchanges don’t care, not really. They get a cut of all the action anyway. The system is stacked so it’s gamblers further down the chain who bear all the risks.
Football Match Fixing
Detecting fixed football (soccer) games.
There is a certain buzz of expectation, because Oscar, one of the fraud analysts, has spotted a game he is sure has been fixed.
“We’ve been watching this for a couple of weeks now,” he says.
“The odds have gone to a very suspicious level. We believe that this game will finish in an away victory. Usually an away team would have around a 30% chance of winning, but at the current odds this team is about 85% likely to win.”
[…]
Often news of the fix will leak so that gamblers jump on the bandwagon. The game we are watching falls, it seems, into the second category.
Oscar monitors the betting at half-time. He is especially interested in money being laid not on the result itself, but on the number of goals that are going to be scored.
“The most likely score lines are 2-1 or 3-1,” he announces.
This is interesting:
Oscar is also interested in the activity of a club manager – but his modus operandi is somewhat different. He does not throw games. He wins them.
[…]
“The reason he’s so important is because he has relationships with all his previous clubs. He has managed at least three or four of the teams he is now buying wins against. He has also managed a lot of players from the opposition, who are being told to lose these matches.”
I always think of fixing a game as meaning losing it on purpose, not winning it by paying the other team to lose.
Casino Hack
Nice hack:
Using insider knowledge the two hacked into software that controlled remote betting machines on live roulette wheels, the report said.
The machines would print out winning betting slips regardless of the results on the wheel, Peterborough Today said.
I’d like to know how they got caught.
EDITED TO ADD (4/17): They got their math wrong:
However, the scheme came unstuck after an alert cashier noticed a winning slip for £600 for a £10 bet at odds of 35-1. The casino launched an investigation that unearthed a string of other suspicious bets, traced back to Ashley and Bhagat, IT contractors working at the casino at the time of the scam.
Computer Card Counter Detects Human Card Counters
All it takes is a computer that can track every card:
The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual “count” of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it’s not, he’s fingered by the computer… and, in the real world, he’d probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too.
The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times.
Of course it does; it’s just a signal-to-noise problem.
I have long been impressed with the casino industry’s ability to, in the case of blackjack, convince the gambling public that using strategy equals cheating.
Comparing the Security of Electronic Slot Machines and Electronic Voting Machines
Other important differences:
- Slot machine are used every day, 24 hours a day. Electronic voting machines are used, at most, twice a year—often less frequently.
- Slot machines involve money. Electronic voting machines involve something much more abstract.
- Slot machine accuracy is a non-partisan issue. For some reason I can’t fathom, electronic voting machine accuracy is seen as a political issue.
Risk and the Brain
New research on how the brain estimates risk:
Using functional imaging in a simple gambling task in which risk was constantly changed, the researchers discovered that an early activation of the anterior insula of the brain was associated with mistakes in predicting risk.
The time course of the activation also indicated a role in rapid updating, suggesting that this area is involved in how we learn to modify our risk predictions. The finding was particularly interesting, notes lead author and EPFL professor Peter Bossaerts, because the anterior insula is the locus of where we integrate and process emotions.
“This represents an important advance in our understanding of the neurological underpinnings of risk, in analogy with an earlier discovery of a signal for forecast error in the dopaminergic system,” says Bossaerts, “and indicates that we need to update our understanding of the neural basis of reward anticipation in uncertain conditions to include risk assessment.”
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.