Poker Stars Says DDoS Attack Caused Outage; WCOOP Main Events Rescheduled for November 6
Poker Stars has confirmed that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks caused “temporary site outages” that forced the cancellation of dozens of tournaments on Sunday, including all six WCOOP Main Events.
All tournaments were paused as a preventative measure at around 8:00 p.m. (BST) yesterday, before being cancelled less than two hours later.
PokerStars confirmed that all affected players would be compensated, and in a statement said that their teams continue to work on looking after players who have been affected.
The site also announced that they intend to run all WCOOP Main Events on November 6, ensuring a 2022 WCOOP Main Event champion will be crowned.
PokerStars
PokerStars has confirmed that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks caused “temporary site outages” that forced the cancellation of dozens of tournaments on Sunday, including all six WCOOP Main Events.
All tournaments were paused as a preventative measure at around 8:00 p.m. (BST) yesterday, before being cancelled less than two hours later.
PokerStars confirmed that all affected players would be compensated, and in a statement said that their teams continue to work on looking after players who have been affected.
The site also announced that they intend to run all WCOOP Main Events on November 6 — including all six NLHE and PLO events — ensuring all 2022 WCOOP Main Event champions will be crowned.
DDoS Attacks
In a statement, PokerStars said that there was no cyber breach during the incident, with all customer accounts and personal information secure.
The well-known PokerStars platform was already the victim of a DDoS attack at the end of September. The disruption was so massive that close competitions had to be cancelled and ongoing tournaments had to be terminated. No one knows why the attack took place – maybe someone lost too much?
PokerStars has since deleted the information page on the DDoS attack. Maybe it wasn’t considered good publicity. On the deleted pages PokerStars confirmed that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks had caused “temporary website downtime”. This was followed by the cancellation of dozens of tournaments, including all six WCOOP Main Events.
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DDoS attack: frustration or competition?
The attack disrupted all tournaments as a preventive measure before being cancelled altogether less than two hours later.
PokerStars confirmed online that all affected players would be compensated and said in a statement that their teams are continuing to work to resolve the impacted players. The declaration can currently only be accessed via the Google cache. But it said:
“In the last 24 hours, we have encountered technical issues caused by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)* attacks that have resulted in temporary website downtime.
We can confirm that all our customers’ accounts and their personal information are safe with no evidence of any cyber breach. Our teams are working to mitigate the issue and address customers whose games may be affected.
We’re not letting these actions stop us from crowning the 2022 WCOOP Main Event Champions and we now plan to hold the Main Events the weekend of November 5th.
There WILL be champions in 2022! For our Southern European players, we will be hosting another Sunday Million on November 6th, although we have no plans to host the Galactic Series Main Event again.
We are aware that some players participating in Monthly Poker Challenges are experiencing these issues. We will therefore compensate players who were unable to complete their challenge due to the impact of the technical issues. Our players and their experience, safety and security on our side remain our top priority.!”
DDoS attacks cost trust and money
Even if DDoS attacks often do not cause direct material damage to hardware, software or code, there is still a high level of damage caused by the disruption to business operations.
While DDoS is a very old form of online attack, it is effective time and time again. Pokerstars doesn’t use protection techniques like CDN networks (such as Cloudflare) or DDoS mitigation services, such as Link11. In an emergency, however, these can sometimes be implemented within hours.