They then send timing data to a custom app on an agent’s phone this data causes the phones to vibrate a split second before the agent should press the “Spin” button. There, Alex and his assistants analyze the video to determine when the games’ odds will briefly tilt against the house. They use phones to record video of a vulnerable machine in action, then transmit the footage to an office in St. These agents roam casinos from Poland to Macau to Peru in search of slots whose PRNGs have been deciphered by Alex. Armed with this knowledge, he can predict when certain games are likeliest to spit out money-insight that he shares with a legion of field agents who do the organization’s grunt work. The venture is built on Alex’s talent for reverse engineering the algorithms-known as pseudorandom number generators, or PRNGs-that govern how slot machine games behave. The time had come for an exit strategy.īut Alex couldn’t just cash out as if he owned an ordinary startup because his business operates in murky legal terrain. He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. TalkTalk and the Metropolitan Police are still investigating.Late last autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business. TalkTalk said it won't contact any of its customers asking for financial or personal information, so watch out for scam calls. We will be contacting all other affected customers in the coming days. The financial information accessed cannot on its own lead to financial loss. We have now contacted all customers who have had financial details accessed, reiterating our advice on what to do to keep themselves safe. We believe we had a responsibility to warn customers ahead of having the clarity we are finally able to give today. It was a difficult decision to notify all our customers of the risk before we could establish the real extent of any data loss. TalkTalk said in its statement on Friday: Two teenage boys from Northern Ireland and West London have since been arrested in connection to the hack.
TalkTalk's stock initially plummeted after it was hacked for a third time late last month following a "significant and sustained" cyber attack that was initially thought to be the work of Russian jihadists. TalkTalk's share price jumped over 6% on the news on Friday morning.
28,000 credit and debit card numbers were also taken, but TalkTalk says in all of these cases the numbers were obscured and the data was not kept with other identifying information like names and addresses.
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Out of this total, 15,656 customers had their bank account and sort code taken. The internet and phone provider said in a statement on Friday that just 156,959 people were affected by the hack, down from a previous estimate of 1.2 million and an initial assessment of 4 million. TalkTalk on Friday radically revised down the number of customers that were hit by a recent cyber theft of personal data.