Hacking a Coke Machine
Hasn’t the increased soda prices from vending machines annoyed you? Don’t you wish you could change the price back from 1.85 to .75 cents? What’s stopping you? With everyone depending on the use of technology to increase cost efficiency, hacks are bound to result. As you may have noticed, coke machines have officially gone LED. A message slowly scrolls by enticing you to enjoy an ice cold coke. Although it is a nice gesture, the real reason these screens have been created is to give the soda companies the ability to easily change prices and count revenue totals. Rather than implement authorization checks, any person can access a coke machines hard drive and lower the prices as much as 0 dollars! After punching in a few numbers in a specific order, a manager screen arises where people can see the total revenue the machine as brought in to how much money is actually in it at the current moment. With technology growing with the future, what is to come of these “little” hacks?
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I think these "little" attacks will continue to occur and perhaps more frequently for a number of reasons. One, they are not addressed. I'm sure that Coke deems the amount of money lost due to these attacks as insignificant, so they are allowed to persist. In addition to this, information security is given sparse concern as it is, so if company's are going to take time to invest in it, it is going to be for the big attacks. "Little" hacks are just that, "little," so they will continue to go unnoticed because they are overlooked, and they will continue to be perpetrated because they are easy to perform.
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