11:47 Burglars captcha earned $ 25 million | |
| Unique in its way it began to consider the Court of New Jersey. A group of scammers and programmers charged (act, PDF, 43 pages) that from 2002 to 2009 earned about $ 25 million in illegal resale of tickets for concerts, sports and other activities. The aggrieved party - online site to sell tickets, including Ticketmaster, Musictoday and Tickets.com. The scam is noteworthy that the fraudsters have developed an automated system for buying tickets on-line sales. They registered two firms (Smaug and Platinum Technologies) solely for the purchase of band IP-addresses and removal of servers in the lease, and for the registration of about 1000 numbers. Through all this infrastructure to make purchases of tickets purporting to be from unique buyers. The entire scam was based on breaking visual and audio CAPTCHA. Fraudsters managed to hack the system effectively reCAPTCHA by intercepting users attempting to log into Facebook, which uses the same system, and automatic generation of database of correct answers. Develop a system for cracking CAPTCHA cost, estimated to be several million dollars. The fact that some popular events of the entire sale is completed within 30 seconds, so breaking CAPTCHA had to work very effectively. Designed bots automatically fills in all necessary fields and automatically performed thousands of purchase transactions simultaneously. One of the main accused in the entire fraud is a 37-year-old computer programmer and systems administrator of Joel Stevenson (Joel Stevenson), who personally wrote the bulk of the code for online scams, and also managed a team of programmers in the U.S. and Bulgaria. It is known that three Bulgarian programmers were paid from $ 1000 to $ 1500 per month. Buying tickets has gained such a level that some events Wiseguy was generally the largest distributor of tickets. Naturally, he could buy them cheaper than the competition. Suffice it to say that in 2007 the company Wiseguy offers its employees a premium 100% of salary if they could take the company to the level of purchase of 1 million tickets a certain value. In 2007, the company actually cracked a lottery draw scarce tickets to a playoff team NY Yankees. The draw was limited to two tickets per person and the company was able to "win" ticket in 1924, which were then sold for about $ 159.000. Two fraudulent company insolent to the point that even the ads on the hiring of programmers who have experience in developing systems on cracking CAPTCHA. They also sought out and invited to interview former employees of companies of the victims to find out the technical details of protection measures, details of CAPTCHA-systems and algorithms for blocking IP-addresses. Via Wired | |
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