Hacking Lottery Machines
Interesting article about how a former security director of the US Multi-State Lottery Association hacked the random-number generator in lottery software so he could predict the winning numbers.
For several years, Eddie Tipton, the former security director of the US Multi-State Lottery Association, installed software code that allowed him to predict winning numbers on specific days of the year, investigators allege. The random-number generators had been erased, but new forensic evidence has revealed how the hack was apparently done.
[…]
The number generator had apparently been hacked to produce predictable numbers on three days of the year, after the machine had gone through a security audit.
Note that last bit. The software would only produce the non-random results after the software security audit was completed.
It’s getting harder and harder to trust opaque and unaccountable algorithms. Anyone who thinks we should have electronic voting machines—or worse, Internet voting—needs to pay attention.
Alex • April 12, 2016 7:49 AM
Similar tactic about 20 years ago in Vegas where the programmer who worked for the Gaming Control Board who was responsible for checking the code on all the Keno machines slipped in his own code to bust the game.
Looks like he got greedy and collected too many longshots for it to be probable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Dale_Harris