Silly question about hackers and gambling

[Zeraph]

Thought just crossed my mind that anytime there's a website doing a cash give away, or contest (like McDonald's monopoly thing) or a gambling/casino website I'd think hackers/crackers would be able to get money like no tomorrow. Are they? Granted there aren't that many talented people out there that can and are willing to do that kind of thing but there's got to be at least ~1000 people in the US that must be cleaning up, but I never hear about anything like that. Is there something in place to keep them from doing stuff like that? I was under the impression just about anything could be hacked. Although I've heard about these new encryption programs that are insane, but still, not everything can be encrypted with CIA level tech.

[Martian]

Originally Posted by Zeraph

I was under the impression just about anything could be hacked.

That seems to be the prevailing opinion of folks who've watched bad Hollywood and have little actual experience in such things. Every time someone on teevee 'hacks the DMV' I die a little inside.

Reality is much more mundane.

Originally Posted by Zeraph

Although I've heard about these new encryption programs that are insane, but still, not everything can be encrypted with CIA level tech.

Strong encryption is not hard to implement. Some particularly paranoid home users are known for encrypting all of their data with 2048-bit RSA or something similarly stupid. There's no particular cost for doing such things, aside from a minor performance hit as your data is decrypted and re-encrypted on the fly.

There are plenty of free and open source tools for doing such things.

Answering your question regarding 'cash giveaways,' I'm not entirely sure what you mean but I would assume that such a thing would be done by large-ish corporations who typically have entire teams of network engineers at their disposal. While it's true that any given one may be incompetent, the odds are that there's somebody within that organization with the knowledge and access to properly secure their networks and servers.

If I were going to manipulate such a thing (and of course I never would), I would first look for ways to do it that don't involve the technology in any way, shape or form. Things like spoof email addresses are a more probable attack vector, and require little to no technical know-how. I wouldn't bother to attack their servers directly because the odds are that they'll be capable of securing themselves and I've got better things to do with my day.

Online gambling is a bit trickier, since it involves part of the application running locally. It's hypothetically possible if the software is poorly designed that someone might implement a script to tip the odds in their favour. Seems unlikely that the people who build the software would be so colossally stupid, though.

All of this is not to say that people don't make money online through illegal means, though. One frighteningly common method is to use a worm or trojan to harvest personal information, and then sell that information to third parties. You probably won't hear about such things in mainstream media, because the people who do such things are rarely caught. Keeping a low profile is better for business.

The days of massively destructive worms and/or virii are mostly past. There's no profit margin.

[JStrider]

I remember when Microsoft Live website had a bunch of word flash games/puzzles you could play to earn points and exchange for prizes.... if you had enough points you could get zunes or xbox 360s or accessories among other things.

some of my friends at work found a program that would play the games automatically.... you just open the game window, and then the bot program and select how long you want it to play for and then just hit go....

it would just play and earn you points automatically... some of my coworkers cashed in bigtime untill microsoft caught on and then started banning the users using the software.

[Xerxys]

It's uniform for all vectors of profit that they use the same company and/or programmer for many websites. Example, almost all subscription porn sites are run by the same company, almost all gambling applications are run by a web browsing locally based application. The engineers who run these are probably many and stretched into segments to prevent unethical behavior. This may sound dumb but it's actually very cost effective and a high insurance factor.

[woody18228]

I would imagine people try, but the companies work hard to keep them away. Just a cat and mouse game like anything else.