19 September 2025
After the alarming situation during the past EPT Barcelona, where thieves broke into the players rooms to introduce viruses into their laptops, this week a young hacker has been arrested in Argentina.
The events aren't related, but they bring serious concerns about security to the table, encouraging the diligent intervention of the authorities. In the Barcelona case, it's assumed that the criminals intended to introduce some kind of Trojan to see the cards of the players in the future. The Argentine hacker case is very different.
With only 19 years old, son of a computer engineer, the young man was the head of a group of hackers who stole $600,000 out of various online players, at the rate of $50,000 per month. His modus operandi was to disrupt the payment processing operations between players and operators through the use of a malware virus.
The virus was hosted on a server and transmitted to the computers of the players when they downloaded software from various online gaming applications . Then he used denial of service attacks (DDoS) to prevent the users from accessing their accounts while he subtracted the money. The DDoS attack was mounted with a network of thousands of zombie computers to overwhelm the payment platform.
Before arresting the teenager and 5 other people, in what was nicknamed "Operation Zombie", authorities cut all power throughout their neighborhood with the intent of preventing the hacker from deleting incriminating evidence. The investigation took about an year, and it was essential to catch him red-handed.
The internet and online gaming, online poker included, move a lot of money - and that always appeals to criminals. Skrill has already admitted that, in the past year, attacks on the accounts of its users have increased dramatically.
