PartyPoker

PartyPoker Acknowledges Recent DDoS Attack Wave

Extortion and disruption via DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack has been a long-time problem for online gambling operators, and PartyPoker has acknowledged that it has been under fire from attackers in recent days. Party, which has seen a resurgence of late in its global traffic patterns, has experienced such attacks before, and it has been combating this latest wave of attacks, which has caused tourneys to be canceled and forced the issuance of refunds on multiple occasions over the past several days.

This wave of DDoS attacks began on August 9 and was detailed intermittently via the site’s corporate presence on social media, with PartyPoker also issuing a brief statement about the situation.

First, here are a handful of posts showing the intermittent nature of the attacks, which are designed to repeatedly cripple a site’s traffic flow. Such attacks inflict damage in several ways, and the following unfortunately describes a very typical identify-respond-cleanup pattern by a site, which typically stretches several days:

Partypoker subsequently offered this statement about the attack wave on its blog:

Apology from partypoker following downtime of 9 August 2018

At around 20:00 CEST on 9 August 2018, partypoker experienced an outage in operations across its online gaming platforms lasting several hours, due to a third-party DDoS attack on our services.

This interruption resulted in various player issues including pauses in gameplay and the inability to log into the software. These issues primarily affected Multi-Table Tournaments (MTTs) and Sit n Go (SNG) tournaments. We have since received further attacks that our teams continue to mitigate, albeit resulting in a small number of disruptions to our services.

We aim to have all refunds from paused and cancelled MTTs processed and completed within 24 hours, and we are continuing to work with our DDoS mitigation service provider to minimise future risks.

Tom Waters, partypoker Managing Director says: “The unfortunate events of 9 August were understandably frustrating for our players. After consideration, the decision was taken to pause and then subsequently cancel all affected tournaments.

Our team worked hard to try to resolve the key issues. As poker players ourselves, we fully understand how frustrating it can be when an online poker room suffers technical issues, and we fully appreciate the considerable patience and understanding shown by our players in light of these difficulties. …

Players can contact Customer Service at [email protected] with any specific questions relating to the events of yesterday.

No sites are immune from such attacks, even though so-called “grey market” sites (not including partypoker) are somewhat mre likely to experience them. The last time a partypoker entity was known to be a DDoS target was back in late 2014 and early 2015, when the US-based partypokernj.com was hit by one of these attack waves.

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