Credit cards and private information of Redbox customers hacked at kiosks

Redbox customers have been warned.

Former Redbox kiosks have been hacked to reveal customers’ credit card numbers and more private information, including their names, addresses and emails.

California-based programmer Foone Turing stated in a social network thread last week that he was able to hack an old Redbox machine in Morganton, North Carolina.

He said he was able to discover the customers’ name, zip code and usage history. They had rented the movies “The Giver” and “The Maze Runner” nine years before the hack.

According to Foone Turing, the Redbox machine’s hard drives had the first 6 digits and last 4 digits of the credit card used, as well as other “lower-level transaction details.”

Foone Turing said Ars Technique It wasn’t a difficult task to find customer data on the machine belonging to the beloved movie rental kiosk.

“The device has many records and customer data was scattered across several of them, usually fragmentary, but it is not too difficult to cross-reference them with other records. It is not very easy to directly access the data,” he said.

“Most of it is saved in an old database format that is not easy to manipulate, but anyone with basic hacking skills could easily extract data manually from the files with a hex editor,” the programmer added.

Foone Turing explained that “the root of the problem” with the Redbox hacking situation “is that it is a machine that has to boot itself, with no chance for a human to enter a decryption password or anything like that. “That means the machine has to be able to decipher itself.”

Redbox’s parent company, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (CSSE), declared bankruptcy in July.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time Redbox’s 24,000 rental kiosks were closing as the company moved to liquidate its assets.

Judge Thomas Horan of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, who is overseeing the case, granted the company’s request to proceed with liquidation proceedings, saying that “there is no way to continue paying employees or pay any bill.”

Redbox’s liquidation reportedly leaves its 1,033 employees unemployed and workers will not receive any severance pay or expanded benefits.

In its June 28 Chapter 11 reorganization filings, CSSE listed $970 million in total debt and consolidated assets of $414 million as of March 31, 2024. Variety reported.

The company still owes money to Walmart and Walgreens (stores where some of its kiosks were located) and to media companies such as Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures Television.

Redbox was founded in 2002 and was the rival video store to Blockbuster, which There is only one franchise store left. in the United States.