ParadisePoker.com Blackjack Cracked
An article in the summer 2005 issue of 2600 magazine (“The Hacker Quarterly”) discusses a timing attack on the Paradise Poker Blackjack game. In essence, the game reveals when the dealer’s hole card is a 10, because it takes longer to process that situation. (The article isn’t online, near as I can tell.)
There’s more in “Online Games Are Written By Humans,” via BoingBoing.
(As an aside, bringing the attack out in public is an example of the best of the old hacker ethos. It would probably be fairly easy to turn this to your financial advantage. The new school attackers would program bot armies to play with your credit cards.)
The discoverer parlayed his observation into a profit of several thousand dollars in one night of play, and the bug was fixed the next day, according to the blog entry cited by BoingBoing.
I don’t know how I missed that.