Hacker students score pizza for pennies
If students and pizza (and probably beer) is not the perfect combination, then imagine students and pizza for next to no money and the money to buy beer.
For months, hundreds of students from cities such as Groningen, Breukelen and Utrecht had been getting pizza from Dutch website Justeat.nl for EUR 0.01 or 0.05 after hacking into the payment system. Just before paying for the pizza through an online banking system, a page was added somewhere to be able to change the final price to a few cents. In other words, the payment system wasn’t installed properly and certainly not secure.
The manager of the website is going to try and get the students to pay for the pizzas after all, as he’s out EUR 30,000. I think he should kick the IT incompetents he hired to install the payment system on his site really hard and claim damages (we don’t run out and sue here). It’s not like he’s the first ever online restaurant using the highly praised and easy-to-use Ideal payment system. Going after the smart students is easier, but lame, and they have no money.
(Link: nu.nl, Photo of Pizza pie by Adam Kuban, some rights reserved)
The people who ordered pizza and hacked the payment system did so with intent to eat pizza and not pay for it. Their crime is theft and the least they should do is pay for what they ordered, received, consumer and presumably enjoyed. I assume the pizza shop guy has in the automated order system their names, addresses and pay source account numbers.
The IT guys are responsible for a working system and loses the pizza house guy might not be able to collect and maybe even the value of the owners time spent doing collections.
… in my opinion.
So that’s ‘score’ as in ‘steal’? Bit of a misleading headline.
@Jon Yes, it is stealing. Score was less of a judgement value.
If you make it easy for people to steal – like leaving the keys in your car, I consider that mitigating circumstances.
And if the students were stupid enough to leave their details online they totally deserve to get caught.