South Korean Hackers! Is Online Poker Safe?
If you follow online poker news, and you’ve seen the news about the latest arrests of hackers in South Korea, you’re probably more concerned than ever about your online safety. The reality is that the South Korean hackers found a security gap that poker sites cannot fix. Imagine if an intruder placed a camera in your house and could watch your computer screen while you play poker. Of course they would have an unfair advantage, and after a number of games, you might realize that something is wrong. Suppose, however, than they had planted these cameras in a thousand houses and that there were thirty of these thieves working together. You’re beaten in hand after hand, and people seem to fold whenever you have a good hand, but it’s not always the same person beating you.
Before you have a chance to get suspicious, they simply move on to a new target, let you play with regular players for a while, and then send in a new member of their crew to take you on some more. It’s hard for poker players to notice that there’s anything unusual going wrong. The poker rooms have difficulty tracing the unusual play patterns. The only way to find out is to find the camera.
What the South Korean hacker gang did was place a computer program that acted just like a camera in the computers at seven hundred different internet cafes around the country. Those programs could show the hackers everything that was done on every computer screen in every internet cafe that they infected.
How does one keep safe from an attack like that? First, use your own computer to play online poker. Second, use a personal firewall and anti-virus software to prevent malware from attacking your computer. Third, scan your computer for malware, spyware, and viruses regularly, at least once a week. If you find anything and you can’t heal it, delete it, or quarantine it, do an internet search on how to get rid of it or ask a computer expert for help in getting rid of it. Viruses don’t just slow down your computer. They can cost you money.
