We’ve recently reported about how a group had managed to track down and exploit a flaw in lottery machines, giving them the ability to print off winning tickets. Now it would seem that investigators have finally managed to track down the methods that Eddie Raymond Tipton, other gentlemen charged with tampering with lottery results, managed to win the lottery on not one but several occasions. It all turned out to be because he was able to act like an inside man and tamper with the random number generator that’s used to select the winning lottery balls.
At the time of the offense, Tipton was the information security director of the multi-state lottery associated. Using this authority he was able to access the random number generator room where he installed several dynamic link libraries (DLLs) to random number generators system. The reason it’s taken so long for the methods used to be determined is because there wasn’t a set pattern, not every result was predictable but as it turns out, some were.
Triggered on three particular days of the year, one at a certain time of a day while the other two were triggered on specific days, the software would then instead of creating random numbers use a provided algorithm, one that Tipton was aware and could calculate the results of.
