The Mob Museum · Las Vegas · a proposed live experience
An AI attacker takes down a working Las Vegas casino floor while you're standing on it. Your crew, strangers you didn't choose, has 25 minutes to find it, throw it out, and bring the slots back.
Watch a session · 60 seconds
Two minutes in, the floor is a lounge. The dealer deals, the slots pay. Then the front-desk phone rings and whoever picks it up hears a friendly voice from "IT" asking for a password reset.
Whatever they say, the screens flicker sixty seconds later. This is the play that took down a real Strip casino in 2023: one help-desk call, answered the wrong way.
Skill · social engineeringEvery slot locks with a red skull. The cage terminal shows a countdown and a price. The lights drop to emergency red, the music cuts to a heartbeat, and a voice introduces itself on every screen.
The attacker is a small AI model running on one box in the room. It has a name, a voice, and a playbook that was written the night before. It will not run the same play twice.
25:00 on the clockAn emergency department never chooses who walks through the door, and a real breach is run by whoever is on shift. So the engine builds the crews at badge pickup and splits friends across them, largest party first.
Sessions start at eight guests and cap at eighteen: Cage, Floor, Hotel, Security. The handoff between strangers is the whole game.
Minimum 8 · maximum 18 · mixed by the engineThree screens of sign-ins. One is impossible: the same employee in Las Vegas and in Lagos, four minutes apart. Tag it and the attacker's path lights up across the casino map on the big board.
Tag the wrong one and the clock loses two minutes while the attacker laughs at your crew by name.
Skill · log analysis · impossible travelAt 14:00 the bell rings. Every crew rotates one station clockwise and has twenty seconds to hand off, ER-style: what we found, what we did, what we were about to do.
The board scores the handoff. A crew that inherits a station without the key fact starts cold and loses time. This is the beat that teaches most: the room discovers that what it knew was never written down.
Skill · handoff under pressureAll four crews converge on the breaker board. Ninety seconds, one lever each: disable the stolen account, block the command-and-control, isolate the infected host, lock the cage database.
The levers are heavy on purpose. Nobody can do it alone, and the attacker knows it.
Skill · coordinated containmentDelete the one scheduled task with a boring name that is actually the attacker, then pull the restore lever. The slots reboot one by one with a chime. The first payout gets the whole room cheering.
Lose, and the lights never come back up. The exit screen reads PAID. People book again to beat it.
Skill · eradication · recoveryBehind the glass
The engine, the attacker, the operator console and the manuals are donated to the museum with source, Apache-2.0.
One GPU box, a small show PC, two big TVs, six used slot cabinets, twenty tablets, lights, levers, paint. Pays back in about two weeks.
No new headcount. Crime Lab staff run it. No cloud AI, no licences. The attacker rewrites itself every night on the box in the room.
Six signed tools, a deny-wins policy, a content filter, a hash-chained audit log and a kill switch. Every line it ever says is on the record.
Build it
Everything runs on a laptop today. The room is paint and used cabinets around it.
A proposal to The Mob Museum by Joey Victorino, former IBM X-Force and Microsoft DART incident responder, Las Vegas. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the museum. All characters are original.
git clone https://github.com/joeyvictorino/operation-blackout cd operation-blackout npm install npm run sign-tools npm run generate-day OPERATOR_TOKEN=pick-one npm start # open /operator/ on the laptop # /board/ on the TVs, /crew/ on each tablet