The purpose of a casino is to pit the gambler against the house in a game of chance. It stands to reason that as casinos adopt modern technology solutions that ‘gamblers’ in the form of white-hat hackers would join in on these games, as well!
They ultimately found that if someone can plug a small device into a USB port on the most modern version of the Deckmate—known as the Deckmate 2, which they say often sits under a table next to players’ knees, with its USB port exposed—that hacking device could alter the shuffler’s code to fully hijack the machine and invisibly tamper with its shuffling. They found that the Deckmate 2 also has an internal camera designed to ensure that every card is present in the deck, and that they could gain access to that camera to learn the entire order of the deck in real time, sending the results from their small hacking device via Bluetooth to a nearby phone, potentially held by a partner who then could then send coded signals to the cheating player.
The entire story by WIRED is a fascinating read.
While the stakes are low here – these are just games for money, after all – the risks presented by trusting a computer to always do the thing you think it will do in the way you think it will do it are monumental. If we are aiming to have computers drive our cars and discover our medical diagnoses anytime soon, we need to be aware of the risks of something as simple as plugging an errant USB thumb drive into such a computer might create.