PokerStars confirms DDoS attacks paralysed site on Sunday
All six World Championship of Online Poker Main Event tournaments had to be cancelled and rescheduled for 5 November
PokerStars has admitted that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – whereby a series of bots flood a website with fake traffic – was the reason for its operations being knocked offline at the weekend.
On Sunday, online poker’s busiest day of the week, the Isle of Man-based operator was forced to cancel dozens of tournaments, including all six of its World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) Main Events.
The WCOOP High Roller Championship, with a $10,300 buy-in, had not long begun when players started seeing the desktop client and mobile apps lagging and grinding to halt.
PokerStars reacted by pausing all tournaments and put out a tweet explaining that its team was dealing with “technical issues”.
Roughly 90 minutes later, the Flutter-owned brand announced that all tournaments currently running were cancelled and prizes would be awarded in accordance with its tournament cancellation policy.
The following day, Monday, the operator confirmed that “technical issues” had been caused by DDoS attacks, resulting in “temporary site outages”.
“Unfortunately, such events are a constant threat to every company operating online and we are no different,” PokerStars wrote in a blog post on its site.
“These attacks mostly go unnoticed by customers because of the investment we have made in our security systems and the layers of protection we have in place to successfully repel them.”
PokerStars said there were no signs of any cyber breach, stressed that a DDoS attack is not a hack and said that all customers’ accounts and personal information are safe. “Our players and their experience, safety and security on our site remain our top priority.”
Recent site outages on PokerStars were due to DDoS attacks, but we can confirm that all accounts are safe and personal information is secure. The WCOOP Main Event and Sunday Million will now run on the weekend of November 5. 1/2
— PokerStars Support (@StarsSupport) September 26, 2022
As well as dotcom player pools, ringfenced Southern European player pools were also impacted by the outage.
PokerStars announced that it will re-schedule its 2022 WCOOP Main Events for 5 November, while Southern European customers will be able to play another Sunday Million tournament on 6 November.
The online gambling industry has been a common target for the perpetrators of DDoS attacks down the years.
In 2018, poker operators including PokerStars, 888, partypoker, Winamax and Winning Poker Network suffered outages caused by DDoS attacks.
Then, two years later, GGPoker was knocked offline by a DDoS attack on the opening day of the World Series of Poker online.
Last week, internet security firm Imperva revealed it had repelled a record single DDoS attack that sent over 25.3 billion requests to one of its customers, a Chinese telecoms provider.