Eddie Tipton, the 51-year-old former security director of the US Multi-State Lottery Association, was convicted last year of hacking a random number generator to fix a $16.5 million lottery prize in Iowa. Now it looks like he could have pulled the same trick Colorado, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas, too. Tipton is in Texas, free on bond pending an appeal, and fighting extradition charges.
Wikipedia’s description of how Tipton hacked the random number generator reads like the script from a crime drama:
Hot Lotto draws are conducted using a random number generator running on a computer in MUSL’s Des Moines facility. The computer is in a “locked glass-walled room accessible only by two people at a time and then only on camera”, and is not connected to the internet or any other networks. Tipton was let into the room on November 20, 2010 to manually adjust the time on the draw computer to reflect daylight saving time; it was alleged that while Tipton was in the room, he used a USB flash drive to install self-destructing malware on the random number generator computer, presumably to rig a draw. Tipton’s co-workers described him as having been “obsessed” with rootkits at the time. It was also noted that on that day, security cameras were configured to record only for “roughly one second per minute,” a change the prosecutors believed was made to prevent anything suspicious from being recorded.