Tag Archives: cheating

How to win BIG and even more!

I recently had a presentation in the OWASP Birmingham (UK) chapter meeting. The crowd was very friendly, and it was a good experience overall with a lot of free food! I definitely recommend attending the next one if you are close by.

In my presentation, I showed a few examples how I managed to win a lot of money in gambling games, cheated when doing my online shopping, and got more free gifts than necessary! Obviously all of my actions were as part of defined security assessments, and therefore I legally had the necessary permissions to carry out my tests.

My presentation’s description was:

“I am going to review a number of interesting flaws that I have seen within the payment systems and gambling games. This includes examples that allowed me to win big while I was gambling very responsibly as well as simple methods that brought me free goods such as expensive books that I really didn’t need, fake moustaches, or even caskets for my fake funeral!

Disclaimer: all issues were reported responsibly to the companies and no moustache or slot machine was harmed in this process! I am not going to name any companies during this presentation.”

Its slides are available via the SlideShare website:

After this presentation, Ashley Cox and I performed a research for NCC Group about abusing voucher codes. As a result, we also made the following blog post: Online shoplifting – exploiting e-commerce basket and voucher faults for five-finger discount.

Perhaps this how some people find glitches to post in the hotukdeals website!

I have also updated the whitepaper I had created for testing financially-oriented web applications to cover more discovered test-cases. This freely accessible guideline has been created for penetration testers and bug bounty hunters to assess ecommerce and financial services applications: https://soroush.me/downloadable/common-security-issues-in-financially-orientated-web-applications.pdf

I would personally be grateful if you could give a reference to me or this whitepaper if you have found it useful or you have managed to identify a vulnerability using this.