White Belt Poker

There were more problems for PokerRoom this weekend when a hacker managed to take control of the chat system without anyone from the company’s staff stopping him for about four hours. The response from their security team was posted on the company’s forum here. The replies by the players are pretty scathing. I don’t play there very much any more and I’ve kept a minimal balance for a while now, but there is a lot of concern that if somebody could hack into the chat system, then how much harder would it be to get into the account servers?? That doesn’t sound likely, and most players were just complaining about the amount of time it took to kick the “chat hacker” out.

But on that same thread, there is one report of the hacker exploiting a problem with the login system which was made public almost a month ago, which allowed anyone to have their username and password stolen just from clicking on a link to a website. If this is true then PokerRoom and the Ongame network really need to get their act together. They’ve already got the beginnings of a mass cash-out on their hands if their forums are anything to go by, so they’ll need to take some pretty swift and decisive action and make it look as if they care about security if they’re going to retain player confidence.

As ever, it’s difficult even for people who work in the IT industry to know exactly how genuine these exploits are, but to inexperienced users just dipping their toes in the online poker water, this could be terrifying. Even rational, knowledgable people will start to think about cashing out when a company not only allows something like this to happen, but also gives the impression (fairly or not) that they are indifferent to the consequences.