“The economic realities of the gaming industry seem to guarantee that the St. Petersburg organization will continue to flourish. The machines have no easy technical fix. As Hoke notes, Aristocrat, Novomatic, and any other manufacturers whose PRNGs have been cracked ‘would have to pull all the machines out of service and put something else in, and they’re not going to do that.’ (In Aristocrat’s statement to WIRED, the company stressed that it has been unable ‘to identify defects in the targeted games’ and that its machines ‘are built to and approved against rigid regulatory technical standards.’) At the same time, most casinos can’t afford to invest in the newest slot machines, whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets; as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers, the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept the occasional loss to scammers.”
Source: A Russian Slot Machine Hack Is Costing Casinos Big Time | WIRED
