It may not have been the greatest hack ever, but police say the malicious software sneaked onto restaurant chain Dave & Buster's corporate network was good enough to earn criminals hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Dave N Busters Game Hacks
Three men have been charged with hacking into the network and then remotely installing 'packet sniffer' software on point-of-sale servers at 11 Dave & Buster's locations throughout the U.S.
A packet sniffer logs information being sent over a network. In this case, the criminals used it to log credit- and payment-card data as it was sent from the branch locations to corporate headquarters.
The hacking took place from April to September 2007 and was lucrative, according to court filings. At Dave & Buster's Islandia, New York, location, for example, the hackers accessed details of about 5,000 payment cards. The information was sold to other criminals who then used the card numbers to scam online merchants. The criminals were able to post at least US$600,000 in fraudulent transactions from 675 cards taken from this one store.
Contacted by IDG News Service, the Islandia Dave & Buster's restaurant manager said he was unaware of any fraud being linked to his location. Dave & Buster's corporate offices did not return a call seeking comment.
Dave & Buster's operates about 50 restaurants in the U.S. The locations feature video games, billiards and arcade-style games.
The people charged are Maksym Yastremskiy, Aleksandr Suvorov and Albert Gonzalez. Yastremskiy and Suvorov are being held in Turkey and Germany, respectively, and face fraud and computer hacking charges.
Yastremskiy 'was one of the biggest resellers of stolen credit card data targeted by the USSS [United States Secret Service],' said Special Agent Matthew Lynch in a sworn statement filed in the case.
Gonzalez, who was arrested in Miami within the past two weeks, wrote the packet sniffing software, Lynch said. He was charged with one count of wire fraud conspiracy.
The three men charged in this case were arrested over the past year, but the case was sealed until Monday.
Unfortunately for the criminals, Gonzalez's code had some problems, according to Lynch.
In April 2007 it bombed its first test, on a point-of-sale server at the Dave & Buster's in Arundel, Maryland. 'The packet sniffer malfunctioned .. and no credit or debit card account information was captured, ' Lynch said.
Even when the packet sniffer worked, the hackers were forced to keep returning to the Dave & Buster's network and restarting their malicious software, Lynch said. A bug in the packet sniffer caused it to shut down whenever the computer it was monitoring rebooted.
International cyber criminals often see poorly secured retail computer networks as an easy source for credit card information.
Cyber thieves used similar techniques in the massive 2006 TJ Maxx data breach, stealing credit card numbers from the company's computer system and then using them for purchases at stores like Wal-Mart. Court filings suggest that more than 94 million accounts may have been affected in that case.
xx. Explanation of Risk
I’d like to take thetime to explain that while this guide can show you how to win amajority of the time you play, it is not a guide that shows you howto win 100% of the time. There will always be some element of riskinvolved when you play skill-based games and there is no gettingaround it. You will find that there are hundreds of elements that gointo determining whether or not you will win, I am simply showing youhow to alter those elements in your favor. Please do not take thisguide as “Cheat Sheet” of some kind because it is nothing of thesort. There is literally no way to win 100% of the time at ANYskill-based game at Dave and Buster’s. You will lose and when youdo you have to realize that being a game of chance, it was bound tohappen sooner or later. Every single game is based in some way onodds and/or the percentage of people who win and how often they doso. This guide will teach you how to take your win ratio from, forexample, 1:22, all the way down to 1:4. When you take that and applyit to how much you are winning each time you win, you will realizethat if there were some miracle way of winning 100% of the time, Daveand Buster’s would do something to counter-balance it ASAP.
I – The “ConfidenceEffect” and How to Avoid it
The Confidence Effectis something I noticed very often over my years of playing thesegames and I am sure you all have seen it as some point in your livesas well. I gave it this particular name because I feel that itembodies what is going on inside a person’s head so perfectly thatI do not know of any other term that could describe it moreaccurately. Basically, the “Confidence Effect” is the state ofmind a person gets into when he/she wins a skill-based game onaccident (by random chance). The severity of the effect variesdepending on how soon from when the person starts playing that theyactually win. The sooner the person wins, the greater the effect, andvice versa. The negative side of this effect is that if a person winsby chance very early from when he/she started playing, they willthink they are the “master” of the game and will continue to playeven though they basically have no idea what they are doing. It isbasically the same idea when playing cards, where if you are winninga lot it is best to stop playing whilst you are ahead. But as we allknow this is never what actually happens, no, that person keepsplaying because he or she thinks that they can keep winning just asmuch as they were before. But what people do not realize is that withany game that has an element of chance involved, the odds of acontinued long-run winning streak get exponentially smaller thelonger you continue to play the game. Dave and Buster’s uses thisto their advantage because they realize that 90% of the people do notconsider this when they are playing. These games cost money to playwhich means that the more you play because you think you are the“master” because you won your first time ever playing, the moremoney you are giving to Dave and Buster’s because I can guaranteeyou that without the right mindset and attitude, you will quickly gofrom winning a few times to losing EVERY TIME. Do not fall for theConfidence Effect people, if you notice that you are winning morethan usual, stop and take a break. Do not get sucked into thinkingthat just because you won 5 times in a row means you can win 50 timesin a row. Use common sense when using this guide and you will bewinning oodles of tickets in no time.
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