What's Behind the Recent String of DDoS Attacks Against Poker Rooms

Earlier this week PokerStars was forced to cancel some running tournaments due to technical difficulties. This is not the first time something like that occurred - for example, during the SCOOP series last year multiple events had to be ended prematurely. Then, Stars blamed it on an outage in a blog post.

This time, however, something more nefarious is behind the technical issues. PokerStars is just the latest large poker room to be a target of a DDoS attack in just a few days after partypoker and America’s Cardroom. But what could be the reason behind the series of transgressions against major online poker rooms?

Most outlets covering the story agree that the most likely culprits are hackers demanding ransom money from the gambling companies. The blackmailers tend to send an overwhelming amount of  traffic to shut down servers in markets where the legality of poker is at best questionable - the latest incident falls right in line with that pattern since players in locally licensed, smaller markets, such as Belgium, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Romania were not affected, as Poker Industry Pro reports.

Another much less probable, but still possible scenario is poker players trying to take advantage of the sites’ payout policies regarding tournaments canceled while running.

While partypoker and PokerStars have both publicly confirmed that the shutdowns were in fact because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, they are not likely to follow up with further details - such as if the hackers have been caught or if ransom money was paid - since most companies do not tend to do so.