![]() In November of 2015, Will Caput worked for a security firm assigned to a penetration test of a major Mexican restaurant chain, scouring its websites for hackable vulnerabilities. So when 40-year-old Caput took a lunch break, he had beans and guacamole on his mind. ![]() It's unclear whether you are the victim of a stolen gift card or, otherwise, you have acquired one—but either way, you cannot do that. Furthermore, it would be illegal and asking how to conduct illegal activity on Quora is frowned upon and against. Gift Card Fraud. Be careful when. Yet another involves thieves using stolen credit cards to load gift cards which they turn around and sell. Activate them with. He decided to drive to the local branch of the restaurant in Chico, California. While there, still in the mindset of testing the restaurant’s security, he noticed a tray of unactivated gift cards sitting on the counter. So he grabbed them all—the cashier didn’t mind, since customers can load them with a credit card from home via the web—and sat down at a table, examining the stack as he ate his vegetarian burrito. Sep 26, 2008 told me that there has been a scam/theft going on involving gift cards. They told me that they can activate the gift cards without paying for them. So basically me and my friend want to steal itunes gift cards and use them. We are aware that they need to be activated at the register to work. I did this before, I stole a card from one shop and tried to get it activated at another, but the cashier told me to go back to the the original place where I got it. As he flipped through the gift cards, he noticed a pattern. While the final four digits of the cards seemed to vary randomly, the rest remained constant except one digit that appeared to increase by one with every card he examined, neatly ticking up like a poker straight. By the time he finished his burrito, he had a plan to defraud the system. ![]() The Gift Grift After years of examining the retail gift card industry following that initial discovery, Caput plans to present his findings at the Toorcon hacker conference this weekend. They include all-too-simple tricks that hackers can use to determine gift card numbers and drain money from them, even before the legitimate holder of the card ever has a chance to use them. While some of those methods have been semipublic for years, and some retailers have fixed their security flaws, a disturbing fraction of targets remain wide open to gift card hacking schemes, Caput says. ![]() And as analysis of the recently shows, actual criminals have made prolific use of those schemes too. “You’re basically stealing other people’s cash through these cards,” says Caput, who now works as a researcher for the firm Evolve Security. “You take a small sample of gift cards from restaurants, department stores, movie theaters, even airlines, look at the pattern, determine the other cards that have been sold to customers and steal the value on them.”. William Caput To pull off the trick, Caput says he has to obtain at least one of the target company’s gift cards. Unactivated cards often sit out for the taking at restaurants and retailers, or he can just buy one. (Not all cards change by a value of one, as that first Mexican restaurant did. But Caput says obtaining two or three cards can help to determine the patterns of those that don't.) Then he simply visits the web page that the store or restaurant uses for checking a card’s value. From there, he runs the bruteforcing software Burp Intruder to cycle through all 10,000 possible values for the four random digits at the end of the card’s number, a process that takes about 10 minutes. By repeating the process and incrementing the other, predictable numbers, the site will confirm exactly which cards have how much value. 'If you can find just one of their gift cards or vouchers, you can bruteforce the website,' he says. Once a thief has determined those activated, value-holding card numbers, he or she can use them on the retailer’s ecommerce page, or even in person; Caput’s written them to a blank plastic card with a $120 magnetic-strip writing device available on Amazon, and found that most retailers accept his cards without questions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2018
Categories |