Do you know the infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick? He and William L. Simon wrote a book called “Art of Intrusion.” It’s a nice book relating stories about real-life (or that’s what the book says) hackers.

Chapter one of the book revolves around the story of how hackers were able to predict the sequence of card generated by a Casino Machine. They were able to find out the actual algorithm used by the system and determine when they could win against the machine. The book even explained how they bought a casino machine so they could study the hardware.

While reading it I remembered an episode on the TV show Numb3rs . On the show, the players had used a high tech version of the card counting system. They had microcomputers on their clothes that emulated algorithm of the casino machine and buzzed them what to do.

The concept is simple. Casino machines use computer chips now to generate “random” occurrences of an event (like those on slot machines). The old casino machines often didn’t really generate random numbers. It was a pre-established list of long sequential random numbers. Whenever a machine is run, it just starts from somewhere along the middle of the list. So all the hackers needed to determine was where the machine was in the list of sequential numbers and find out the next nearest win.

It’s all done quite high tech, of course.

Here’s how it is theoretically done with that claw/ufo-catcher machine thing. Watch the movie.

Hacking the hardware eh?

One other chapter that caught my attention was about Adrian Lamo. Adrian wasn’t really a techie. He just understood how people thought and how computer systems generally work. This is the first time I’ve read about a hacker who wasn’t really a geek. This guy hacked into the New York Times and Microsoft. Pretty cool huh?

I haven’t finished it yet but I do recommend it to tall wanna-be hackers out there.

UPDATE: Apparently Ms. Toral also read another Kevin Mitnick book, the Art of Deception. She loved it a lot. In my original post here I though she was also referring to this book that I read. Now I want to read that Art of Deception book as well.