Slot machine hacking

One of my followers on Twitter, Eddie "Mastersnake" DeSoto (@corvetteflex)  wants to know if there's any way that a slot machine can be made to pay off more often from a remote location, AKA hacking it. Here's what I know.

First of all, I know of no documented case in the United States where that is happened. I have heard about it happening in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. But first, a little background. There are two types of slot machines being used currently, 1 used all over the world and the other only found in North American casinos.

The first type is a stand-alone slot machine like you would find in Nevada, or anywhere in the world that there's a corporate-owned casino. What designates them as 'stand alone" is that they have a random number generator chip embedded on their motherboard, and every time you press the spin or play button that RNG provides a number which corresponds with a game result. Everything that happens on the screen, the spinning wheels, the sounds, the special effects or whatever, are just a dog and pony show designed to entertain you for a moment until you realize you lost your money.

The second type is called a Video Lottery terminal (VLT) and these are found exclusively on tribal casinos on Indian land in the US. When you press spin or play on these machines, the machine, through a wired network connection,  polls a server and a game controller, and the game result comes from there. All the machine does is handle the graphics and audio. The amount you lose or win is handled by a server in another (highly secure) room. There's a lot of network security deliberately built into this type of system, and for all intents and purposes these types are unhackable.

The only documented cases that I know of, in Eastern Europe, as I said, involve organized criminals reverse engineering, or hacking, the algorithm in the RNG chip. These criminals have somehow gotten ahold of a legitimate slot machine, took the chip off the mother board, and deciphered the code that is written in to the chip. By doing so they learn the types of conditions that exist when the chip will issue a number that corresponds to a winning result (and they are usually looking for a jackpot). These conditions can include day of week, time of day, and how much play the machine has or hasn't been getting in say, the last 2 hours. They can include other things too, in fact they can include anything the slot machine manufacturer, or the purchaser (the casino) wants them to include.

After they've cracked code, the technicians for the mobsters develop an app that can run on a smartphone. This app, once it knows what type of machine you are sitting at, will vibrate at the precise moment when the player needs to press the play button. The less lag time there is between that vibration and the pressing of the play button, the better the chance will be of a a winning result coming up on the machine.

So that's basically it. This is the only way I know to hack a slot machine, and these are the only slot machines that I know for sure to have been hacked. This started at least 3 or 4 years ago in Europe, but I have heard about some recent cases in Asia, as well. I'm sure they will eventually attempt this in the United States. It's just a matter of time.

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