GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 17 - September 2011

by J. Todd, Executive Director, APCW I magine hearing that your favorite on- line casino, poker room or sportsbook was recently hacked, with account information possibly jeopardized. You’d be understandably upset and concerned. You’d want to know when and how this breach occurred. And you’d want to know if you could ever trust this property again. Now imagine that you heard your account was hacked 19 months ago, and you’re only learning about it now. Welcome to the dilemma facing customers at Bet24. On July 25, Bet24 posted a notice on their main site titled “Important Se- curity Information.” The notice said that “BET24 customer infor- mation was stolen from BET24 by means of illegal electronic access to our database, which is believed to have taken place in December 2009.” You heard that right. The breach took place more than a year and a half ago, and Bet24 is only now informing customers. The stolen information included customer names, addresses, e-mails, user account IDs, ac- count passwords and encrypted payment card numbers. This is, quite simply, unacceptable. In fact, in no reality is this acceptable. The officials asshats at Bet24 claim that de- spite knowing about the breach when it occurred, they weren’t aware that cus- tomer data was stolen. And you know what’s truly pathetic about this story? They might be right. The rev- elation of Bet24’s stolen data only came out after police arrested the hackers and saw they had Bet24’s customer informa- tion in their possession. Nope, that doesn’t cut it. And it doesn’t matter that you refunded money to ac- counts that may have been affected if they reported suspicious activity. If you knew that your security had been breached, you needed to send out a warning to players IMMEDIATELY. Not the next week. Not later in the year. And certainly not 19 months after the fact. In order for a player to place a deposit at an online gambling site, he or she must be confident of three things: The games will be fair. There will not be any prob- lems processing payments. And account information will remain safe. If you fail in any of these three things, you will rightly earn a spot on the Wall of Shame. So let’s all give a warm hand to Bet24. Your ineptitude and overall shadiness allowed you to join such scumbags as Russ Hamilton and Grand Privé. Congratulations. WALL OF SHAME APCW’s Wall of Shame