Saturday, August 31, 2013

Listen to My Usenix 2013 Presentation!

As I posted a few weeks ago, I was an invited speaker at the 2013 Usenix Security Symposium in Washington D.C. My talk, which dealt with many facets of high-tech and low-tech casino cheating, seemed to go over quite well with the attendees, mostly very high-level computer and Internet systems security people. Listen to it here.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Could Angel-Eye Surveillance Technology Explain What Happened in $33 Million Crown Casino Scam?

In my previous post about this huge casino scam that took place in Australia's Crown Casino, I wrote about my doubts about the whole thing. I presented the question: How can cheats intercepting video transmissions in the present use that info to gain an advantage. I stressed that what you need for a cheating-edge is information about the order of cards yet undealt, with enough time for the cheaters to process that information and turn it into winning bets. Well, one writer to me suggested that with Angel Eye technology in use in casinos, this could actually happen. Angel Eye is a tiny video scanner that casinos actually embed inside card shoes to film the cards as they come out of the shoe. So in theory, if the cheats can get this info before they have to bet, they can win with this future knowledge. But I still have problems with this explanation for the scam. Firstly, all bets have to be made on the baccarat table BEFORE the cards are dealt, which would mean the cheats would need to know the value of three cards underneath the first to be dealt before it is dealt. Knowledge of the top card alone would help but would not be sufficient to beat a casino out of $33 Million. Second, can the Angel Eye scanner film 4 cards one-on-top-of-the-other simultaneously? Truly, I don't know, but I don't think so. Thirdly, if any of this is possible, wouldn't the dealers have to be involved? Any mabye supervisors as well? I think the deal of the game would have to be vastly altered to make any of this even conceivalbe. And lastly, if this supposedly happened in blackjack (it was never release on which game this scam supposedly took place), the cheats would need information deeper down in the card shoe to make it work, with the exception of knowing that one of the first few cards off the shoe is an ace. All in all, I am still quite skeptical about this whole thing.