Online Poker Cheats Able To See Your Cards Using Netbot Attacker

South Korean newspaper ‘Joongang’ has reported that a gang of 33 computer hackers managed to successfully cheat online poker players out of $45,265 over a 6 month period, before finally being caught recently.
The Korean gang leader, known only as 30-year-old Yu, apparently bought a computer program called ‘Netbot Attacker’ from a Chinese hacker for somewhere between $2,500 and $12,500 last November.
Yu then sold the programme on to 29-year-old Kim who, along with a gang of hackers, then managed to infect over 11,000 computers and use them to install the piece of software on 700 Internet cafes throughout South Korea. They were then able to see the opponent’s hole cards, thus gaining an unfair advantage over any poker player unlucky enough to be seated at the same virtual table as them.
The Netbot Attacker is one of several DDoS-style programs that have caused problems in South Korea in the past. On July 7, 2009, for instance, several South Korean government Web sites and major banks sites became inaccessible for almost a week following a cyber-attack by up to 50,000 infected PCs.
South Koreans may enjoy a high-speed internet connection, but as a consequence they are more prone to exploitation by botnet hackers and at one stage during that attack between 20 to 40 gigabytes of bandwidth was being generated every second.
In this the latest online poker attack incident, a police spokesmen said the Netbot Attacker updated at such a fast rate that security programs were unable to keep up with it and control its spread. The gang consequently managed to rake in their illegal profits from November last year up until this May, when the national police working alongside South Korea’s National Intelligence Service finally caught up with them.
In the meantime, South Korean online poker player have been warned to take extra care if playing at one of the country’s Internet cafes.