Wednesday, March 12, 2008

How to Cheat At Poker: Now it's Trojan Cheats

TROJAN VIRUS USED TO STEAL FROM ONLINE POKER PLAYERS

We have all heard of the Trojan horse, both in the Homer's classic "Odyssey" and in today nefarious cyber underworld. I have written numerous articles on these dark corridors through which passes much of the online poker and casino cheating crime wave. The cyber Trojan horse is an evil piece of software designed to do serious damage to its unsuspecting victims. And according to 4Flush.com, it is now attacking online poker players:

Have you ran your Virus Scanner Lately? Recently, after finding a Trojan horse virus on her computer, a 4flush.com staff member began paying a bit more attention. The virus in question could not be removed by any of the virus scanners we tried, however, it can apparently be removed manually. The infected computer was put out to pasture, and the matter dropped. Until another of our computers became infected. We looked a little more into the matter, not wanting to put to many more of our computers in that already crowded pasture, and found a story on Tech Radar that claims online poker players are some of the ripest targets there are when it comes to thieves using Trojan viruses to steal from computer users.

A professional online poker player was attacked by someone he would play against regularly online. And we’re talking about professional players, and big money. Hundreds of thousands of euros on the table at a time,” Says Mike Hyppönen, chief research officer at security software company, F-Secure .

The story tells of a professional poker player, one that wins on a regular basis, going on a bad losing streak. He got no action with his winning hands, his bluffs were raised or called, his bankroll was quickly deflating. That player had accepted a tool via an download from another player, the tool was designed to calculate odds, but what the unnamed professional poker player did not know was that the tool also came with a Trojan virus, allowing the other player, the player that originally sent the odds calculator to cheat.

With just a click of a button the cheating player was able to see a screen shot of his opponents computer. On a side note, it would seam a new online poker room has opened, perhaps to have a little fun with the search term, Bet Trojan comes up first when you’re looking for poker and Trojan’s in a Google search.