Hungry hackers stole $3k worth of snacks from CIA vending machines

The mighty Central Intelligence Service (CIA) is a civilian organisation tasked by the American Government to collect info and analysing it regarding nationwide safety info from all over the world. This might be one of many causes that it was unaware that some intelligent hackers, working for one of many hundreds of contractors which might be employed throughout the CIA constructing, helped themselves to about $3,000 value of snacks from the CIA merchandising machines in 2013.

The machines function by means of playing cards, which must be topped up with funds on-line, and are operated by FreedomPay. The hackers came upon that by simply disconnecting sure cables within the merchandising machines this may allow them to dispense limitless quantities of meals, even when a card had run out of cash.

Well, why would anybody preserve this supply of free chocolate bars, crisps and different snacks to themselves, properly beneficiant to a fault they didn’t, they naturally advised all of their mates! Rather surprisingly it took the CIA months to find that the machines needed to be stuffed up rather a lot and the amount of money being acquired was diminishing, identical to the snacks within the merchandising machines!

Well when the invention was made, it seems that the sneaky culprits weren’t undercover brokers or veteran Al-Qaeda chasers, however contractors working within the constructing. The CIA officers below the Office of Inspector General (OIG) put surveillance cameras on the machines, and found out the rip-off, to many it might come as a shock that the CIA constructing will not be lined with CCTV cameras!

The perpetrator, considered one of hundreds of contractors within the CIA, admitted he had used his information of laptop networks to learn the way to get a snack with out going by means of the tiresome means of paying. Naturally his free snacks got here to an abrupt finish as members of the cabal had been rounded up, interrogated after which escorted from the constructing and fired by their employers. In the report which was launched this week, which is closely redacted, the video footage recovered from the surveillance cameras captured quite a few perpetrators engaged within the FreedomPay theft scheme, all of whom had been readily identifiable as Agency contract personnel.

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