Poker lessons

Tyler Cruz is your typical young web entrepreneur, building websites from nothing in niche markets and living off the advertising revenue they generate as well as dabbling in domain brokering and ‘flipping’ (adding value to a domain and selling it on for profit). One of his successful sites is a poker community where you can talk about every aspect of the game, you just can’t play it. Like all such site operators, Cruz takes security seriously. Or at least he did, after the site was hacked over the weekend he is now taking security a whole lot more seriously.

He was lucky, if that’s the right word, in as far as the hacker concerned was more old school than script kiddie and not in it for the blackmail money. Which is highly unusual, considering that online gambling businesses are a prime target for just such online protection rackets. Indeed, while the true depth of the problem is unlikely to ever be known because many online casinos consider such ‘fees’ as part of the business and would rather pay up and stay up rather than say no and see a million dollars of revenue disappear every day they are down, there is no doubting it is a popular criminal pastime. Cruz probably escaped with his wallet intact because his site is a discussion forum and not a casino, and the hacker wanted to prove his prowess and explain exactly how he had hacked the site.