Spotted at Bruce Schneier's blog is a link to a story on CNBC about an insider attack on the Multi-State Lottery Association by computer programmer Eddie Tipton.
After hitting the first ill-gotten jackpot in Colorado in 2005, Tipton began building himself a 4,800-square-foot (446-sq. meter) house with a movie theater and gym on 22 acres (9 hectares) with a pond outside of Des Moines. Over the course of the next six years, Tipton would go on to fix six more lottery games across five states, netting more than $2 million. Yet his employer trusted him so much that he was promoted in 2013 to head information security, placing him in charge of protecting the very lottery computer systems he had been cheating.
[...] Tipton admitted as part of his plea that in 2005 he added two extra routines to the computer coded[sic] that generated the random numbers, allowing him to predict numbers on specific drawing days.
[...] The Multi-State Lottery Association provides computers for lotteries in 33 states the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The computers are designed to randomly draw numbers in several games, including Powerball, Mega Millions and Hot Lotto. Players have sued the association alleging they were defrauded by Tipton's scheme.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Wednesday August 23 2017, @10:33PM (5 children)
Whatever happened to the giant washing-machine-like drums of identical balls from which you drew somewhat randomly? Too many balls for a good visual ?
What happened to not paying out lottery prizes to anyone remotely related to the lottery operation?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:32PM (3 children)
How did a U.S. Navy ship collide with a merchant vessel despite the safeguards in place? Nobody was paying attention.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:09AM
How did another huge USN ship collide with a vessel less than two months later, despite a clear, fresh example as warning that they should be paying attention?
Incompetence...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:40AM
Philadelphia experiment. The ships were cloaked.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:02PM
They were paying attention. To each other's ghaytrans asses.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:01PM
That has been taken advantage of in the past, also. Nearly every lottery organization or company has had at least one incident.