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Allegation: Lottery Official Hacked RNG To Score Winning Ticket
SternisheFan writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica about what may be the most movie-worthy real-life crime story of the year so far: Eddie Raymond Tipton, 51, may have inserted a thumbdrive into a highly locked-down computer that's supposed to generate the random numbers used to determine lottery winners, The Des Moines Register reported, citing court documents filed by prosecutors. At the time, Tipton was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, and he was later videotaped purchasing a Hot Lotto ticket that went on to fetch the winning $14.3 million payout.
In court documents filed last week, prosecutors said there is evidence to support the theory Tipton used his privileged position inside the lottery association to enter a locked room that housed the random number generating computers and
infect them with software that allowed him to control the winning numbers. The room was enclosed in glass, could only be entered by two people at a time, and was monitored by a video camera. To prevent outside attacks, the computers aren't connected to the Internet. Prosecutors said Tipton entered the so-called draw room on November 20, 2010, ostensibly to change the time on the computers. The cameras on that date recorded only one second per minute rather than running continuously like normal.
"Four of the five individuals who have access to control the camera's settings will testify they did not change the cameras' recording instructions," prosecutors wrote. "The fifth person is defendant. It is a reasonable deduction to infer that defendant tampered with the camera equipment to have an opportunity to insert a thumbdrive into the RNG tower without detection."
In court documents filed last week, prosecutors said there is evidence to support the theory Tipton used his privileged position inside the lottery association to enter a locked room that housed the random number generating computers and
infect them with software that allowed him to control the winning numbers. The room was enclosed in glass, could only be entered by two people at a time, and was monitored by a video camera. To prevent outside attacks, the computers aren't connected to the Internet. Prosecutors said Tipton entered the so-called draw room on November 20, 2010, ostensibly to change the time on the computers. The cameras on that date recorded only one second per minute rather than running continuously like normal.
"Four of the five individuals who have access to control the camera's settings will testify they did not change the cameras' recording instructions," prosecutors wrote. "The fifth person is defendant. It is a reasonable deduction to infer that defendant tampered with the camera equipment to have an opportunity to insert a thumbdrive into the RNG tower without detection."
...but instead of hacking a random number generator, they injected paint into the ping-pong balls used for the live drawing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...
You don't see it more often because only idiots actually try to skim the lottery via the actual lottery.
The ones who get away with it are the guys taking it out of the account via the budget (usually for a tax break for their large donors), or taking bribes from shop owners who want to sell tickets.
What is the point of using an expensive and highly locked down computer in place of a dead simple machine filled with pingpong balls?
There was a game somewhere that was proven to have software so faulty that it wasn't even capable of 'drawing' one of the possible numbers that players could choose.
Computer-based random number generators are just about the worst possible way to conduct a lottery. They're not random, they're subject to tampering, they're only understood by a few people, and their function while operating cannot be observed by the public. They also aren't exciting.
Machines that dump a bunch of balls into a spinning drum and then start pulling those balls out look cool on TV, plus they can be inspected, the public understands how they work, their operation is transparent, and because of the nature of the beast, are about as random as one can get within the context of a machine doing the drawing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.