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Eddie Tipton, a programmer for the Multi-State Lottery Association, secretly installed software that allowed him to predict jackpots.
What’s surprising to me is how many lotteries don’t use real random number generators. What happened to picking golf balls out of wind-blown steel cages on television?
Wired is reporting on a new slot machine hack. A Russian group has reverse-engineered a particular brand of slot machine—from Austrian company Novomatic—and can simulate and predict the pseudo-random number generator.
The cell phones from Pechanga, combined with intelligence from investigations in Missouri and Europe, revealed key details. According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas-based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.
“The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000 in a single week.
The easy solution is to use a random-number generator that accepts local entropy, like Fortuna. But there’s probably no way to easily reprogram those old machines.
An impressive Chinese device that automatically reads marked cards in order to cheat at poker and other card games.
Roughly three weeks later, there is a operation program available to crack ACBL hand records.
- Given three consecutive boards, all the remaining boards for that session can be determined.
- The program can be easily parallelized. This analysis can be finished while sessions are still running
this would permit the following type of attack:
- A confederate watch boards 1-3 of the USBF team trials on vugraph
- The confederate uses Amazon web services to crack all the rest of the boards for that session
- The confederate texts the hands to a players smart phone
- The player hits the head, whips out his smart phone, and …
Here’s an interesting case of doctored urine-test samples from the Sochi Olympics. Evidence points to someone defeating the tamper resistance of the bottles:
Berlinger bottles come in sets of two: one for the athlete’s “A” sample, which is tested at the Games, and the other for the “B” sample, which is used to corroborate a positive test of the A sample. Metal teeth in the B bottle’s cap lock in place, so it cannot be twisted off.
“The bottles are either destroyed or retain visible traces of tampering if any unauthorized attempt is made to open them,” Berlinger’s website says about the security of the bottles.
The only way to open the bottle, according to Berlinger, is to use a special machine sold by the company for about $2,000; it cracks the bottle’s cap in half, making it apparent that the sample has been touched.
Yet someone figured out how to open the bottles, swap out the liquid, and replace the caps without leaving any visible signs of tampering.
EDITED TO ADD: There’s a new article on how they did it.
In Room 124, Dr. Rodchenkov received the sealed bottles through the hole and handed them to a man who he believed was a Russian intelligence officer. The man took the bottles to a building nearby. Within a few hours, the bottles were returned with the caps loose and unbroken.
One commenter complained that I called the bottles “tamper-proof,” even though I used the more accurate phrase “tamper-resistance” in the post. Yes, that was sloppy.
If doping weren’t enough, cyclists are cheating in races by hiding tiny motors in their bicycles. There are many detection techniques:
For its report, Stade 2 positioned a thermal imaging camera along the route of the Strade Bianche, an Italian professional men’s race in March held mostly on unpaved roads and featuring many steep climbs. The rear hub of one bicycle glowed with almost the same vivid orange-yellow thermal imprint of the riders’ legs. Engineers and antidoping experts interviewed by the TV program said the pattern could be explained only by heat generated by a motor. The rider was not named by the program and could not be identified from the thermal image.
[…]
Cycling’s equivalents of the Zapruder film are online videos that show unusual patterns of bike changes that precede or follow exceptional bursts of speed by riders. Other videos analyze riders’ hand movements for signs of switching on motors. Still other online analysts pore over crashes, looking for bikes on which the cranks keep turning after separation from the rider.
Unlike the thermal images, however, the videos have only implied that a motor was present.
In a statement, the cycling union, which commonly goes by its French initials, U.C.I., said it had tested and rejected thermal imaging.
“The U.C.I. has been testing for technological fraud for many years, and with the objective of increasing the efficiency of these tests, we have been trialling new methods of detection over the last year,” the governing body said. “We have looked at thermal imaging, X-ray and ultrasonic testing, but by far the most cost-effective, reliable and accurate method has proved to be magnetic resonance testing using software we have created in partnership with a company of specialist developers.”
Story of Julie Miller, who cheated in multiple triathlon races:
The difference between cheating in 1980 and cheating today is that it’s much harder to get away with now. What trips up contemporary cheaters, Empfield said, is their false assumption that the only thing they have to worry about is their timing chip, the device they wear that records their time at various points along a course.
But the use of additional technology especially the ubiquitous course photos taken by spectators and professional photographers, which provide a wealth of information about athletes’ positions and times throughout a race makes it difficult for people to cover their tracks after the fact.
“What these people don’t understand is that the photos contain so much data they don’t know that this exists,” Empfield said of cheaters. “They think that if they hide in the bushes and re-emerge or take the chip off or whatever, they’re in the clear. But the problem is that people can now forensically recreate your race.”
Reminds me of this 2012 story about marathon cheating.
EDITED TO ADD (4/27): An update with proof of cheating.
It was a manipulation of the terminals.
The 5 Card Cash game was suspended in November after Connecticut Lottery and state Department of Consumer Protection officials noticed there were more winning tickets than the game’s parameters should have allowed. The game remains suspended.
An investigation determined that some lottery retailers were manipulating lottery machines to print more instant winner tickets and fewer losers….
[…]
An investigator for the Connecticut Lottery determined that terminal operators could slow down their lottery machines by requesting a number of database reports or by entering several requests for lottery game tickets. While those reports were being processed, the operator could enter sales for 5 Card Cash tickets. Before the tickets would print, however, the operator could see on a screen if the tickets were instant winners. If tickets were not winners, the operator could cancel the sale before the tickets printed.
Interesting article on detecting cheaters in professional bridge using big-data analysis.
Basically, a big part of the game is the communication of information between the partners. But only certain communications channels are permitted. Cheating involves partners sending secret signals to each other.
The results of this can be detected by analyzing lots of games the partners play. If they consistently make plays that should turn out badly based on the information they should know, but end up turning out well given the actual distribution of the cards, then we know that some sort of secret signaling is involved.
Ravens have been shown to identify and remember cheaters among their unkindness.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.