** I decided to write an article about how to keep your online money safe after reading an article about high-profile players were getting their online accounts hacked through various means.
I approached a computer hacker who knows more about computer networking than the NERD-on-Site guy who comes over and reboots your modem for $60 a pop.
He has a Bachelors degree in computer network engineering from Westwood College of Technology. and has a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification, as well as a Cisco Certified Design Professional (CCDP) certification. He has worked for companies such as IBM, Cisco Systems, and Dell.
We talked about the best way to keep your online money safe and how to prevent it from ever being at risk.**
In general, the casual players are pretty safe. It would take quite a bit of work to do a sophisticated hack against individuals in their homes, and generally speaking it would not be worth the time or effort to go after such a small "score".
That is not, to say that it can't or won't happen, just that the chances are fairly low. However, the people that keep large sums in their online accounts should take extra precautions to safeguard themselves. My thoughts are that if you are playing poker online for a living you should treat your computer security just like any other business would since internet poker is your business.
There are multiple ways of going about it, but one fairly simple way to do it would be to simply get a rootkit* installed on their machine; there are several ways to go about this (which I won't go into for fear of getting just a tad too technical), but once they have your machine rooted they can pretty much do whatever they want.
The easiest thing to do would be install a program that records every key stroke that you type, and simply wait for you to type in your password. Now lets say you check the little box that says to save your password - well, then they just start looking through files for it or they simply uncheck the box and make you type it in and then they have access to your account and pretty much anything else that they want.
*A rootkit is malware that consists of a program, or combination of several programs, designed to hide or obscure the fact that a system has been compromised.
The most common mistake that people do is not staying current with updates. By updates I mean operating system updates, anti-virus updates etc. Also, a good firewall is an absolute must. Don't just be satisfied with the default Windows firewall, and if you are really serious about being safe, have a good hardware firewall installed in your home. You can get a fantastic enterprise class firewall for under $1000.00, which is a small price if you are keeping large sums of money in your online account.
Hotels and Motels are a common place to get hacked.
Hotel wireless internet connections are a complete joke. There really isn't any security with it. Usually you just jump on and start doing your thing, which means that a hacker can do the same thing - only now you two are on the same network!!!
Once they are on the same network, it's just a numbers game as there are bound to a lot of high stakes online players playing online and not all of them are going to be secure, so they are at least going to find a few victims to get rooted and once that is done they can just sit back and wait for the information to come rolling in.
Nobody can ever be "hackproof" if banks and governments can't do it, neither can the everyday person. You can however take steps to try and prevent it.
* 1. Strong passwords that you change on a regular basis, not just your online accounts but your windows login password as well.
* 2. You don't have to have administrator level privileges for most day-to-day things, so create another account for day-to-day use.
* 3. Updates, updates, updates. I cannot stress enough to keep your computer and anti-virus up to date.
* 4. A good firewall. Your Internet is only as secure as your firewall. I personally run a hardware firewall on my network and a software firewall on all of my machines.
* 5. Be smart and use safe browsing habits such as: don't open files that you are not 100% sure of; if you get a popup asking you to click an option, make sure you know what you are clicking on; I see this one at least 2 or 3 times a week where somebody just clicks "ok" to a popup only to find out that you just said "ok" to a virus or malware; and preventing it was just as simple as clicking "NO."
Area905 from Backroom Gaming
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