" Most of the evening all of the major poker sites have been either down, or extremely slow including: Full Tilt, Stars, and Party. Understandably if it was just network problems in one area then just one site would be affected, but since all 3 of the sites I play on are affected (network traces done from across the country); this leads me to believe that there are hackers out there attacking the servers of the major sites on its busiest tournament night.
This happened to many sportsbooks several months ago for big events like the superbowl. The russian mafia was supposedly involved, with a process of hiring hackers with mad skill to send so much data at once to a sportsbook's server that it went down and thus could not take any bets. This method of hacking is called Denial of Service or (DDOS) and is impossible to stop, thus making it very dangerous. The difficulty with the hackers is that is it extremely hard to get enough power to even slow down the major poker sites for a couple peak hours.
The hackers then contact the company in which they are DDOS'ing and proceed to try to extort them out of money. I believe the figure that came up to the sportsbooks around superbowl season was $50,000. The sad thing is, many of the major sportsbooks chose to just pay the $50k rather than losing millions in bets they would take.
This could be what is happening again, there is very little else that could explain all of the major sites being down/extremely slowed for this period of time. If an area was having server/network problems they would be 100% down (not just slow). And the fact that all 3 major sites are indeed still up, but very very slow leads me to believe that hackers are involved this time. Hell maybe its the Washington St. Government hiring these kids?
For more info search DDOS on google, or for a kid named "MafiaBoy" that shut down Yahoo/Ebay/etc for hours one afternoon and spent time in jail because of that (he was using the same DDOS attack).
Hopefully this will give you some insight as to why the sites are slow and not just thinking its "tech problems".
" Most of the evening all of the major poker sites have been either down, or extremely slow including: Full Tilt, Stars, and Party. Understandably if it was just network problems in one area then just one site would be affected, but since all 3 of the sites I play on are affected (network traces done from across the country); this leads me to believe that there are hackers out there attacking the servers of the major sites on its busiest tournament night.
This happened to many sportsbooks several months ago for big events like the superbowl. The russian mafia was supposedly involved, with a process of hiring hackers with mad skill to send so much data at once to a sportsbook's server that it went down and thus could not take any bets. This method of hacking is called Denial of Service or (DDOS) and is impossible to stop, thus making it very dangerous. The difficulty with the hackers is that is it extremely hard to get enough power to even slow down the major poker sites for a couple peak hours.
The hackers then contact the company in which they are DDOS'ing and proceed to try to extort them out of money. I believe the figure that came up to the sportsbooks around superbowl season was $50,000. The sad thing is, many of the major sportsbooks chose to just pay the $50k rather than losing millions in bets they would take.
This could be what is happening again, there is very little else that could explain all of the major sites being down/extremely slowed for this period of time. If an area was having server/network problems they would be 100% down (not just slow). And the fact that all 3 major sites are indeed still up, but very very slow leads me to believe that hackers are involved this time. Hell maybe its the Washington St. Government hiring these kids?
For more info search DDOS on google, or for a kid named "MafiaBoy" that shut down Yahoo/Ebay/etc for hours one afternoon and spent time in jail because of that (he was using the same DDOS attack).
Hopefully this will give you some insight as to why the sites are slow and not just thinking its "tech problems".
- Jimmy (hoodlum09)"
I was on both Party and Stars all evening, no problems at all. I'm on Cogeco out of Burlington.
Comments
This happened to many sportsbooks several months ago for big events like the superbowl. The russian mafia was supposedly involved, with a process of hiring hackers with mad skill to send so much data at once to a sportsbook's server that it went down and thus could not take any bets. This method of hacking is called Denial of Service or (DDOS) and is impossible to stop, thus making it very dangerous. The difficulty with the hackers is that is it extremely hard to get enough power to even slow down the major poker sites for a couple peak hours.
The hackers then contact the company in which they are DDOS'ing and proceed to try to extort them out of money. I believe the figure that came up to the sportsbooks around superbowl season was $50,000. The sad thing is, many of the major sportsbooks chose to just pay the $50k rather than losing millions in bets they would take.
This could be what is happening again, there is very little else that could explain all of the major sites being down/extremely slowed for this period of time. If an area was having server/network problems they would be 100% down (not just slow). And the fact that all 3 major sites are indeed still up, but very very slow leads me to believe that hackers are involved this time. Hell maybe its the Washington St. Government hiring these kids?
For more info search DDOS on google, or for a kid named "MafiaBoy" that shut down Yahoo/Ebay/etc for hours one afternoon and spent time in jail because of that (he was using the same DDOS attack).
Hopefully this will give you some insight as to why the sites are slow and not just thinking its "tech problems".
- Jimmy (hoodlum09)"
is an interesting article which describes the hacker issue. No idea if it was in effect yesterday