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Hackers attack Full Tilt and Pokerstars

February 19, 2008

Hackers disrupt major online poker rooms

As we reported earlier in the week, major online poker sites Poker Stars and Full Tilt were both attacked and essentially shut down from these DDos attacks. These attacks sent more than 100k “false connections” to both major poker rooms and basically crashed the servers of the leading rooms. Thousands of players posted in the forums about Major tournaments and SNG’s being interrupted and canceled during last week and this week.

A DDoS attack impairs a poker rooms ability to handle connections by attacking its web servers,and flooding the servers with traffic from thousands of different locations. A DDoS attack involves the remote computers infected with a virus or malware; after activation, these otherwise innocent computers are then incorporated into the “virus net” used in the attacks on the targeted site.

At this time, the motives for these attacks are unknown, but one can only speculate that it may be a preliminary attack and there may be more to come. Although neither poker room has issued an official statement, they have assured us that they have “corrected all issues related to the sever problems players experienced”. When asked about the DDos attacks, they stated that they have extensive security measures in place to prevent a repeat of these issues..

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