Last week’s Distributed Denial of Service attacks on internet poker provider America’s Card Room (see previous report) may have been at the behest of an as yet unidentified business rival, according to a player report on his contact with the anonymous hacker behind the attacks.
Pressed on why he didn’t get a real job, the botnet controller reportedly said that his job was DDoS and that he had been commissioned by another online poker operator to conduct the attacks.
“This is my job; another site gives me money to DDoS you,” the attacker apparently claimed.
How accurate that is may be open to question, because America’s Cardroom has been subjected periodically to such assaults and accompanying extortion attempts since 2014, with CEO Phil Nagy well known on social and other media for his “no deals with DDoS extortionists” policy.
Nagy took to Twitch this week to talk about the most recent America’s Cardroom-Winning Poker Network outage, revealing that the attackers launched 26 separate assaults late last week and over a 48 hour period.
“We had 14 million IP addresses pointed at us,” he said.
For WPN’s large online poker community the DDoS attacks have adverse implications too; Nagy announced that he has had to cancel the third leg of his company’s popular OSS Cub3ed series due to the risk of again coming under attack during a major competition.
The company is investing in enhanced security measures, and once these are established the event will be rescheduled.
View Nagy’s rather rambling thoughts on this issue here: