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Hacking vending machines has been around a long time—remember those globe candy machines? One method of absconding with the goods from this type of vending machine relied on Scotch tape or already-chewed gum. The tape or gum was stuck to the coin destined for the candy machine. If everything went right, the coin would stay in place, and several pieces of candy or gum could be had by carefully rocking the crank back and forth.
As vending machines become more intricate so have the hacks, except for the "brute-force" approach. That's where someone—usually an irate customer deprived of their purchase—violently rocks the machine until what they are after drops out of the screw mechanism and can be jimmied out of the swinging door near the bottom.
Needless to say, that approach tends to draw attention to the perpetrator—not a good thing in highly-secured buildings. Besides, today's vending machines are likely to be bolted to the floor or each other and are much more sophisticated—possibly containing machine intelligence, and belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT).
Hacking this kind of vending machine obviously requires a more refined approach. The type security professionals working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might conjure up, according to journalists Jason Leopold and David Mack, who first broke the story A Bunch Of CIA Contractors Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines. In their BuzzFeed post, the two writers state, "Several CIA contractors were kicked out of the Agency for stealing more than $3,000 in snacks from vending machines according to official documents... ."
Source: TechRepublic
Read the full Office of Inspector General report from October 2013. on Document Cloud.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:07AM (1 child)
Not hacking. I find it laughable the CIA would fire these presumably highly trained "hackers" for stealing $0.75 cent bags of fritos.
My guess is, the CIA has hacked all they can hack and needs to cut back, when word came for volunteers these suckers stayed put while everyone else took a step back.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:08PM
If they were fired for stealing $0.75 bags of Fritos, they were fired for stealing (the equivalent of) FOUR THOUSAND of them.
There's being clever and figuring out a way of hacking a vending machine. Then there's using that knowledge to steal $3,000 in snacks. If these clowns had just done a proof of concept and taken a couple Snickers bars as a lark, they'd have probably received a "ha ha, but seriously don't do that again" type of response. The fact that they went on to steal thousands of dollars of merchandise indicates a serious lack of judgement and morals and I'd be firing them in a hurry too.