all major poker sites down today

Apparently, all the major poker sites were down today for a period of time. Several posters on rec.gambling.poker are saying it was a distributed denial of service attack by hackers blackmailing the sites. Another possibility is that the hosting center the sites are in (nearly all major online poker sites are hosted out of an Indian reservation in Canada) went down. As of this writing, the sites appear to be operational again. (via Decker's Journal)

There have undoubtedly been recent DDoS attacks against some of the larger sites, notably Party Poker which has had a lot of trouble over the past few days. I can't imagine this hacker group being successful at retrieving money from these guys, though; after the major DDoS attacks on some of the big shopping sites a few years ago, a lot was written and tools produced to prevent DDoS attacks.

Update: Decker has posted a response from Paradise Poker, in which they confirm that they have been hit by DoS attacks.

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