Redbox easily reverse-engineered to reveal customers’ names, zip codes, rentals
Since Redbox went bankrupt, many have wondered what will happen to those red kiosks and DVDs. Another question worth examining is: What will happen to all the data stored inside the Redboxes?
Redbox parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in June and is in the process of liquidating its assets. Meanwhile, stores with Redboxes are eager to remove the obsolete hardware. And tinkerers have reported getting their hands on Redbox kiosks and doing all sorts of things with them, including running Doom.
But Redboxes falling into technologists' hands can also result in the uncovering of customer data from kiosks' hard drives. As spotted by Lowpass today, programmer and expert reverse engineer Foone Turing reported via Mastodon that she was able to retrieve records for 2,471 transactions from the disk image of a Redbox hard drive. Turing told Ars Technica that she got the image from a Discord channel: