Andy Greenberg

FBI says card shuffling machines were hacked as part of major illegal gambling schemes The FBI says card shuffling machines were hacked to cheat at poker as part of a major illegal gambling scheme. NPR's Ailsa Chang talks to a reporter who's been covering the machines' vulnerabilities.

Here’s me talking to NPR yesterday about hacking casino card shufflers, because I really can’t shut up about hacking casino card shufflers. www.npr.org/2025/10/24/n...

(Hacking card shufflers is the new hacking McDonald’s ice cream machines, fyi)

I cannot actually believe that Cuomo put out this insanely racist AI-slop deepfake ad. In a sane society, this alone ought to be a career-ending move.

How Hacked Card Shufflers Allegedly Enabled a Mob-Fueled Poker Scam That Rocked the NBA WIRED recently demonstrated how to cheat at poker by hacking the Deckmate 2 card shufflers used in casinos. The mob was allegedly using the same trick to fleece victims for millions.

Two weeks ago, we at WIRED published a video showing how a hacked casino card shuffling machine can be used for undetectable cheating in poker. Now it turns out the mob and a couple of NBA stars were already (allegedly) using exactly this trick to make millions. www.wired.com/story/how-ha...

How Hacked Card Shufflers Allegedly Enabled a Mob-Fueled Poker Scam That Rocked the NBA WIRED recently demonstrated how to cheat at poker by hacking the Deckmate 2 card shufflers used in casinos. The mob was allegedly using the same trick to fleece victims for millions.

Two weeks ago, we at WIRED published a video showing how a hacked casino card shuffling machine can be used for undetectable cheating in poker. Now it turns out the mob and a couple of NBA stars were already (allegedly) using exactly this trick to make millions. www.wired.com/story/how-ha...

Incredibly, the Justice Department today charged a group of alleged Cosa Nostra mobsters with using a version of the exact card shuffler hacking technique we demonstrated in the video below to rig poker games with an NBA player and coach, stealing millions. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Okay here it is

Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck “We were the targets.” WIRED spoke to seven Tesla Cybertruck owners about their most controversial purchase and why they're proud to drive it.

Treat yourself to this incredible photo essay/interview series with Cybertruck owners from @zoeschiffer.bsky.social. Will put my favorite part in a reply below because it is a SPOILER.

Feds Seize Record-Breaking $15 Billion in Bitcoin From Alleged Scam Empire Officials in the US and UK have taken sweeping action against “one of the largest investment fraud operations in history,” confiscating a historic amount of funds in the process.

NEW: In the most significant action against brutal scam compounds in Southeast Asia to date, US and UK officials have sanctioned the alleged operators of more than 10 scam centers in Cambodia.

146 entities linked to the Prince Group have been sanctioned—and $15 billion of crypto seized

Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypte...

Researchers pointed a satellite dish at the sky for 3 years and monitored what unencrypted data it picked up. The results were shocking: They obtained thousands of T-Mobile users' phone calls and texts, military and law enforcement secrets, much more: www.wired.com/story/satell... 🧵👇

Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypte...

Read our full story here: www.wired.com/story/satell...

That means a dish in a different place would pick up entirely different data. Probably an entirely different stream of unencrypted secrets.

As cryptographer Matt Blaze told me:

A lot of this data, such as the T-Mobile leak, is now encrypted thanks to the researchers' work. But all of it was obtained from a single dish on the roof of a building in San Diego. These findings are based on just 15% of geostationary satellite signals over the US and Mexico.

But some of the data the researchers found was even more sensitive: US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities. Industrial control system communications to power grids and offshore oil and gas.

Most striking to me was that the data included phone calls and text messages from several US and Mexican phone carriers. Remote cell towers connect to core carrier networks via satellite, relaying conversations via space—sometimes with no encryption.

Their study, out today, reveals that roughly half of geostationary satellite communications they monitored were unencrypted. A flood of secrets pouring down from space, available to anyone with an $800 receiver setup. (And there's no doubt spy agencies have been listening, too.)

Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypte...

Researchers pointed a satellite dish at the sky for 3 years and monitored what unencrypted data it picked up. The results were shocking: They obtained thousands of T-Mobile users' phone calls and texts, military and law enforcement secrets, much more: www.wired.com/story/satell... 🧵👇

YouTube video by WIRED I Cheated At Poker By Hacking A Casino Card Shuffling Machine | Hacklab | WIRED

Thanks to IOActive for their help and a couple nice Vegas locals for being good sports about getting cheated in a game of poker on camera.

Morale of the story: when a smart device is involved, you'll never know if the odds are stacked against you. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20...

So Joseph and I created a system of covert signaling where the hacked shuffler would send to his phone the exact cards in everyone's hands, and he'd silently tell me how to bet. Stay tuned for the part where I'm such a terrible poker player that I almost lost anyway.

The company that sells the Deckmate 2 says it's patched these flaws. But I talked to sources who say that shufflers in the wild are still sometimes unpatched—and even used for actual cheating—in unlicensed gambling establishments and private games.

Hackers Rig Casino Card-Shuffling Machines for ‘Full Control’ Cheating Security researchers accessed an internal camera inside the Deckmate 2 shuffler to learn the exact deck order—and the hand of every player at a poker table.

To do this, I teamed up with Joseph Tartaro at IOActive, whose research team found hackable vulnerabilities in the Deckmate 2 card shuffler I wrote about two years ago. His exploit accesses a *camera inside the shuffler* and transmits the deck order to a phone. www.wired.com/story/card-s...

YouTube video by WIRED I Cheated At Poker By Hacking A Casino Card Shuffling Machine | Hacklab | WIRED

For the latest episode of Hacklab, we carried out one of the more fun and stressful hacking experiments of my career: We hacked a casino card shuffler to help me cheat in a game of poker against unsuspecting players in Vegas. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ20...

A source shares some screenshots of the Lapsus ransomware gang celebrating the government shutdown as a disruption to the FBI investigations tracking them.

They also refer to Trump as "my king."

The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers in dozens of agencies to learn what happened as the Department of Government Efficiency tore through their offices.

NEW

WIRED led the way in reporting on Elon Musk's efforts to dismantle the US government. My colleagues and I spoke to 100s of employees at dozens of agencies to understand what happened.

This is the definitive story of DOGE as told by those who experienced it

www.wired.com/story/oral-h...

Careful Martijn some politics reporter at the NYT is probably typing this into the CMS right now

(35 miles is like…Connecticut.)

The Secret Service isn't claiming it foiled any plot targeting the UN General Assembly. Just that a big collection of SIMs (probably used for fraud) could have *potentially* disrupted NYC cell service. The SIMs were in a *35 MILE* radius of the UN.

These headlines are all pretty egregiously wrong:

‘SIM Farms’ Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in New York Threatened US Infrastructure, Feds Say The agency says it found a network of some 300 servers and 100,000 SIM cards—enough to knock out cell service in the NYC area. Experts say it mirrors facilities typically used for cybercrime.

A giant SIM farm in the NY area with 100,000 SIMs was most likely used for spam/scams and even swatting US officials—which led the feds to find and dismantle it.

(Speculation it was going to be used to attack the the UN General Assembly seems like...a bit of a leap.)

www.wired.com/story/sim-fa...

I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.

And read @stevenlevy.bsky.social on the Silicon Valley he thought he knew, and what has taken its place: A cohort of billionaires who, by bending a knee to Trump, are placing company fortunes over the wellbeing of society.

(The art on this one, too, is spectacular.)

www.wired.com/story/silico...

ALL HAIL THE TECHNOCRACY Tech went all in on Trump this year. It's just the beginning.

You can find the entire Politics package, including my editor's letter, here:

www.wired.com/politics-iss...

Here it is: The @wired.com Politics Issue is now live, with more stories rolling out all week. We're so proud of this one.

Behold this cover; truly a work of art.

And we're treating it that way: Starting today, you can find it on murals, billboards, and posters across in five U.S. cities.