Online Casino Bettors Targeted by Very Dangerous Security Scams

 The top online casinos need to pay close attention to the security developments in the online casinos industry, just as they look at regulation battles with scrutiny, and oversee their mergers and acquisitions with other online casinos. As online casinos grow, they will need to deal with security issues much more seriously. Gamblers playing in online casinos are being warned that they may increasingly be targeted by criminals looking to steal money by infecting their machines.

 According to a release, a recent flurry of fairly small scale threat activity has led some to suspect that casinos may be targeted with increasing frequency as their popularity grows. Certainly with users processing transaction data, online gamblers will be attractive targets for criminals. It was also reported that Finnish antivirus vendor F-Secure detected a potentially malicious rootkit application, which was being dropped onto users machines from poker community site CheckRaised.com when they downloaded a 'raketracker' tool - which allows users to monitor the house's take on their poker games. With the malicious tool in place the program's author could access login details for a number of well know online gambling portals. The hacker could then effectively make a lot of money by setting up games between himself and the compromised users, on whose behalf he would lose on purpose.

 A statement on the CheckRaised.com website put the blame on a third-party developer and said the malicious program has now been removed. It warned all users to reset their poker passwords. Last week another online gambling firm issued a statement to users of its site warning of a social engineering scam which attempted to direct users to a site that would drop a Trojan onto their computer - effectively surrendering control of the PC to an unknown third party. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said the level of malware related to online gambling is very low but he added: "In the future, if online gambling continues to increase in popularity and as a small number of companies dominate the online market, it wouldn't be surprising to see hackers turn their attention in this direction." He added: "Gamblers need to not only be careful about which websites they visit, and give their bank details to, but also which add-ons and helper programs they deploy to help them have a winning streak."