Online Gambling, Casinos, Poker and Sports Betting Magazine

Hackers Add Further Twist to Online Casino Crash

A further twist to yesterday’s story about the high profile crash of online casino site PlayNow.com emerged this morning amidst speculation that it may have been hackers, not eager customers, that caused the site’s servers to overload.

British Columbia’s New Democratic Party have raised concerns that players’ personal information may have been compromised as a result of the site going down and have criticised PlayNow.com for their reluctance to issue a statement about the incident.

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation originally insisted that unexpectedly high traffic generated by the launch of the new site was responsible for the server crashing, but the NDP have since suggested that the site may well have been hacked instead.

“Experts have made an assertion that hacking was a possibility,” said the NDP’s Shane Simpson, though he provided no hard evidence to support his claims. “But the most concerning thing is that the government and BCLC have not been definitive that there wasn’t some kind of activity that breached the security of the site”.

It has been speculated that hackers may have intentionally overloaded the site by using bots to generate excess traffic, allowing them to then mine for data once the servers were down – but as of yet there has been no proof to support these claims.

In the meantime Rich Coleman, Minister of Housing and Social Development who is also responsible for BCLC, assured PlayNow.com customers that the matter would be looked into immediately and that the site would be up and running again very soon.

“It does appear that some information – because of all the data hitting at once – might have been displayed on somebody’s computer, so we are dealing with that,” he said.