Online Poker Players at risk of cyber theft

[Fonzi]

Internet Security expert Mikko Hypp?nen warns that many online poker players are at risk of scam artists.

?Online poker players are a massive target for hackers. People play it with real money obviously, so they?re a big target. We were just investigating a case where a professional online poker player was attacked by someone he would play against regularly online. And we?re talking about professional players, and big money. Hundreds of thousands of euros on the table at a time,? he said.

?All of a sudden he started losing. He would regularly lose even when he had a great hand ? pocket aces for example. If he had an unbeatable hand, the other players would simply fold. And when he tried to bluff, he would lose. He lost a lot of money this way, we?re talking hundreds of thousands of euros.

?This went on for weeks. And when we looked into it we realised that one of the other players at the table had sent him a tool. A calculater to help optimise the poker playing or whatever. And we found that the application included a Trojan.

?Which means that when he was playing online poker against these people who were in another country, the guy could press a button and he would receive a screenshot of the target?s screen. So he sees the hold cards. If you?re playing poker and the other players know your cards, it?s pretty hard to win.

?It?s a clever attack because the hacker could have just stolen the account and moved the money away. But he would have been caught. But this way the target was losing his money to someone else and he didn?t realise it was a con. I don?t think many online poker players realise that those kind of attacks are being done.?

Original Article posted at Tech Radar

This prolly goes on more than people realize.Its sorta his fault for trying to get an edge up(or so he thought)by using some calculater.I never belived using some *tool.It is unfair anyways.They dont let ya bring tools to a live table,so you dont need one anywhere else either i believe.When ya play with me,yer playing just me and my brain!...lol

[Fonzi]

I agree, I also want to add that on another forum I run, I made the mistake of trusting someone to be a super moderator and she sent emails to some of the members with a note saying she became an affiliate and could they please sign up under her. She included a poker.exe file that was a Trojan that gave her access to players account. We were lucky and caught it very quickly before damage was done. We also notified the authorities in her country and hope shes sitting in jail.

We will never send you an executable file, NEVER. If there ever something we want you to test out, it will be posted in the forum and will have been totally tested on our end.

[targetguy1]

some scary crap. i hate people who steal.

[lkport]

I wouldnt mind knowing the name of the calculator. Avoiding it would be a good idea

[Dareiko]

It is not mew. Online money related stuff is always under the threat of hackers . This is a big draw back of online business and related matters .

[Dunbar]

You just have to be carefull with the stuff you install on your pc. And get a decent firewall and stuff.
I read something about an email that was sent to all the Full Tilt high stakes players, which contained a "security patch." It was a keylogger ofcourse.

[KeepBlinkin]

this kind of things suck.. specially when the affected person doesnt realize that has been attacked..

[Dareiko]

Originally Posted by KeepBlinkin

this kind of things suck.. specially when the affected person doesnt realize that has been attacked..

Yes that's the pretty strange and bad thing about the online world.

Wow thank god i never have much money involved in poker and thanks for the advice on things i never knew possible it has helped me to learn alot for sure