The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers by Kevin D. Mitnick, William L. Simon Read Free Book Online

hitting casinos in other cities -- Reno, Atlantic City, and elsewhere.

    The trips, the play, the winning gradually became routine. But on one occasion, Mike thought the moment they all dreaded had come. He had just "gone up a notch" and was playing the $25 machines for the first time, which added to the tension because the higher the value of the machines, the closer they're watched.

    I was a bit anxious but things were going better than I antici-

    pated. I won about $5,000 in a relatively short amount of time.

    Then this large, imposing employee taps me on the shoulder. I

    looked up at him feeling something queasy in the pit of my stom-

    ach. I thought, "This is it."

    "I notice you been playing quite a bit," he said. "Would you like

    pink or green?"

    If it had been me, I would have been wondering, "What are those -- my choices of the color I'll be after they finish beating me to a pulp?" I think I might have left all my money and tried to dash out of the place. Mike says he was seasoned enough by that point to remain calm.

    The man said, "We want to give you a complimentary coffee mug."

    Mike chose the green. 16 The Art of Intrusion

    Marco had his own tense moment. He was waiting for a winning hand when a pit boss he hadn't noticed stepped up to his shoulder. "You dou- bled up to five thousand dollars -- that's some luck," he said, surprised. An old woman at the next machine piped up in a smoker's raspy sandpa- per voice, "It ... wasn't ... luck." The pit boss stiffened, his suspicions aroused. "It was balls," she cawed. The pit boss smiled and walked away.

    Over a period of about three years, the guys alternated between taking legitimate consulting jobs to keep up their skills and contacts, and skip- ping out now and then to line their pockets at the video poker machines. They also bought two additional machines, including the most widely used video poker model, and continued to update their software.

    On their trips, the three team members who traveled would head out to different casinos, "not all go as a pack," Alex said. "We did that once or twice, but it was stupid." Though they had an agreement to let each other know what they were up to, occasionally one would slip away to one of the gambling cities without telling the others. But they confined their play to casinos, never playing in places like 7-Elevens or supermar- kets because "they tend to have very low payouts."

    Caught! Alex and Mike both tried to be disciplined about adhering to "certain rules that we knew were going to reduce the probability of getting noticed. One of them was to never hit a place for too much money, never hit it for too much time, never hit it too many days in a row."

    But Mike took the sense of discipline even more seriously and felt the other two weren't being careful enough. He accepted winning a little less per hour but looking more like another typical player. If he got two aces on the deal and the computer told him to discard one or both of the aces for an even better hand -- say, three jacks -- he wouldn't do it. All casi- nos maintain "Eye in the Sky" watchers in a security booth above the casino floor, manning an array of security cameras that can be turned, focused and zoomed, searching for cheaters, crooked employees, and others bent by the temptation of all that money. If one of the watchers happened to be peeking at his or her machine for some reason, the watcher would immediately know something was fishy, since no reason- able player would give up a pair of aces. Nobody who wasn't cheating somehow could know a better hand was waiting.

    Alex wasn't quite so fastidious. Marco was even less so. "Marco was a bit cocky," in Alex's opinion:

    He's a very smart guy, self taught, never finished high school, but one

    of these brilliant Eastern European type of guys. And flamboyant. Chapter 1 Hacking the Casinos for a Million Bucks 17

    He knew everything about computers but he had it in his head

    that the casinos were