PartyPoker Acknowledges Recent DDoS Attack Wave
Extortion and disruption via DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack has been a long-time problem for online gambling operators, and PartyPoker has acknowledged that it has been under fire from attackers in recent days. Party, which has seen a resurgence of late in its global traffic patterns, has experienced such attacks before, and it has been combating this latest wave of attacks, which has caused tourneys to be canceled and forced the issuance of refunds on multiple occasions over the past several days.
This wave of DDoS attacks began on August 9 and was detailed intermittently via the site’s corporate presence on social media, with PartyPoker also issuing a brief statement about the situation.
First, here are a handful of posts showing the intermittent nature of the attacks, which are designed to repeatedly cripple a site’s traffic flow. Such attacks inflict damage in several ways, and the following unfortunately describes a very typical identify-respond-cleanup pattern by a site, which typically stretches several days:
We are aware of ongoing issues I can assure you our team are doing their very best to resolve and resume normal service. We apologise for the inconvenience and will update you all once resolved in full.
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 9, 2018
Apologies for the technical difficulties, we are working to rectify, the site has been targeted with a DDoS attack from third parties. We hope to resume normal business very soon and will keep you updated. Thank you for your patience
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 9, 2018
Concerning the @partypoker issues tonight. Apologies for the technical difficulties, we are working to rectify, the site has been targeted with a DDoS attack from third parties. We hope to resume normal business very soon and will keep you updated. Thank you for your patience.
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 9, 2018
We are still working on fixing the problems with the poker software, more information will follow. Please rest assured that all refunds will be processed tomorrow. We appreciate your patience.
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 9, 2018
We are aware that some customers are currently experiencing issues. Please bear with us while we investigate. We will provide you with an update as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. pic.twitter.com/x3aTUYwmhX
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 10, 2018
Our tech team have rectified the issues and all services have been resumed. Sorry for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience. pic.twitter.com/ueFI5lv78T
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 10, 2018
Please read this apology and explanation for the recent downtime from our Managing Director Tom Waters. https://t.co/vMV0kWfCuj 18+|play responsibly|begambleaware pic.twitter.com/StKp5duwv2
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 10, 2018
We are continuing to experience issues and apologise for the disruption, we are continuing to mitigate the attacks and hope to have services back to normal soon. pic.twitter.com/91hkQAOiUp
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 10, 2018
Due to the DDoS attacks + measures taken to prevent the widespread login issues seen over the last 48 hours, a small number of players may continue to experience login issues. If you are experiencing connection issues please contact customer services who can assist pic.twitter.com/RnjhTzGaLe
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 11, 2018
There have been a number of questions about refunds, understandably, which have taken longer than we would have liked due to the scale of the issues faced. We apologise for this and hope to be resolving these into your accounts asap, the aim is today. Thank you for your patience pic.twitter.com/nzW0d4bikf
— partypoker (@partypoker) August 11, 2018
Partypoker subsequently offered this statement about the attack wave on its blog:
Apology from partypoker following downtime of 9 August 2018
At around 20:00 CEST on 9 August 2018, partypoker experienced an outage in operations across its online gaming platforms lasting several hours, due to a third-party DDoS attack on our services.
This interruption resulted in various player issues including pauses in gameplay and the inability to log into the software. These issues primarily affected Multi-Table Tournaments (MTTs) and Sit n Go (SNG) tournaments. We have since received further attacks that our teams continue to mitigate, albeit resulting in a small number of disruptions to our services.
We aim to have all refunds from paused and cancelled MTTs processed and completed within 24 hours, and we are continuing to work with our DDoS mitigation service provider to minimise future risks.
Tom Waters, partypoker Managing Director says: “The unfortunate events of 9 August were understandably frustrating for our players. After consideration, the decision was taken to pause and then subsequently cancel all affected tournaments.
Our team worked hard to try to resolve the key issues. As poker players ourselves, we fully understand how frustrating it can be when an online poker room suffers technical issues, and we fully appreciate the considerable patience and understanding shown by our players in light of these difficulties. …
Players can contact Customer Service at [email protected] with any specific questions relating to the events of yesterday.
No sites are immune from such attacks, even though so-called “grey market” sites (not including partypoker) are somewhat mre likely to experience them. The last time a partypoker entity was known to be a DDoS target was back in late 2014 and early 2015, when the US-based partypokernj.com was hit by one of these attack waves.
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