The man in question is Joe Levy, who has a day job, but also likes to fiddle with code. His favorite hacking targets are famous apps and games. For example, according to him, he found a susceptibility in the Foursquare app that let him become the mayor of anything in 2010. One day he became the Mayor of the White House and “held a title higher than President of the United States”, as told by the 25-year-old. Levy says he was immediately banned from Foursquare following this act of digital civil disobedience. Levy since then has spent his leisure time trying to discover other technical glitches on which he could take advantage of. His latest abuse concentrates on a popular online game, and has even let him earn a good amount of money. The coder was able to discover a way to hack the popular trivia app, Trivia Crack to always choose the right answer. For months now, he has been selling it as a Chrome extension. Levy explained his discovery in an email to Business Insider. He examined methodically and in detail the way in which Trivia Crack transmits data from its server to players. After doing this, he clearly understood that not only the questions and multiple choice answers are given to the device at each turn, but it “also says which answer is correct!” Hence, the data sent from the server to the player always contains the knowledge of the answer which is correct. Taking advantage of this, Levy was able to construct a Chrome extension that automatically chooses the right answer during each turn. According to him, this was initially made as a personal device to fool friends. However, he got bored constantly beating his friends and made a decision to figure out if he could make some money. “I released the Chrome extension publicly so others could do the same thing, for a price,” he wrote to Business Insider. The extension, nicknamed Trivia Cracker, works by adding a button onto the desktop version of Trivia Crack. When the users are given a question in the game, the clicking of the button automatically chooses the right answer. So the ‘game’ becomes a chain of events of pressing the hack button and then pressing ‘continue.’ By following these two steps, it automatically leads one to victory. Levy posted a video of his extension at work on YouTube and it looks like people took to his extension.
He says that over 23,000 people have downloaded it, since its initial release late last year. He did not disclose an exact number of how many people have paid for it (there’s is a free trial as well as $1.99 full version), but said it was “thousands of people.” Levy added, “it’s enough to fund a nice vacation to Trivia Crack’s headquarters in Argentina to say ‘Hi’.” The game has yet to offer a solution, despite the fact that his extension abuses a direct susceptibility in the Trivia Crack. Levy is of the opinion that this could be because the app makers would have not thought that someone would make time to build such an extension. In addition, it is possible that a solution would make the game run significantly slower. Levy stands to keep making money until Trivia Crack mends the bug. He is presently working full time at a tech company, so this adds up to a nice bonus. He says that only mere mortals have been able to dominate in spite of the cheaters paying to win. A friend of his, whom Levy describes as “one of the best Trivia Crack players in the world,” was able to beat him once despite the app. It so happened that they both had tied and the game favors the player who had answered in the end. Levy mockingly added: “And yes, I checked to make sure he wasn’t using Trivia Cracker too.”
