 DDoS Attacks at Full Tilt, Titan and Party PokerWhat should have been another tournament for the history books at Full Tilt Poker turned into a huge disappointment and embarrassment for the second largest poker room online, when the main event for the FTOPS series came to a staggering crash during the final table.
Full Tilt had gone off line and it became clear to everyone that something was definately not right. From that point on the poker room was unavailable for players and even the website could not be accessed until Tuesday when users were being redirected to www2.fulltiltpoker.com.
It turned out that Full Tilt wasn’t the only poker room experiencing this mystery “power shortage”. Reports were coming in that CD Poker, Titan Poker and even Party Poker were also having problems.
So what was causing the issues among these rooms? It’s called a DoS attack, also known as a denial-of-service or DDoS (distribute denial-of-service).
Wiki explains it as “an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to it intended users. Although the means to, motives for , and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consist of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinably.” A diagram of how it works is shown below.
In layman terms, someone or a group of individuals sent out an attack to a handful of online gambling sites including Russian based site pokerlistings.ru. In total there have been ten gambling company’s who fell victim to these DDoS attacks which have been reported to start on February 10th straight through to the 18th. Some of these lasted only for a few short hours while others, such as Full Tilt, were days. When a denial-of-service attack is rendered, its main goal as explained by Shadowserver.org, is to overwhelm the websites with tons of bogus GET requests.
Shadowserver monitors HTTP-based botnets and seen some unusual activity with terms for poker coming up heavily within their system. A further look into the system revealed that this wasn’t just on poker rooms although they seem to be the main target. Financial processors, insurance companies along with other websites were also under a DDoS.
According to Shadowserver, CD Poker was unavailable for a few short hours to which they believe is because the poker room “may have had some form of DDoS protection through Prolexic” while Titan Poker was “running off of four different IP addresses” but appears to be back online as of this morning. Full Tilt Poker is still redirecting their traffic to www2.fulltiltpoker.com.
It’s not clear why these attacks were made or what was being gained from them, although rumours have started that these could be an attempt to extort the companies involves. As more news develops we will be sure to update but for now players can access Full Tilt at the address above.
Author: Cheryle Kaus |
