The Winning Poker Network (WPN) was forced to cancel its $1 million guaranteed prize pool tournament on Sunday, after an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack caused disruptions and connectivity issues for players participating in the event. While the tournament had been running for several hours, late registration was still open, so all players were refunded their buy-ins and entry fees in accordance with network policy. The tournament was an ambitious effort by WPN, a network that includes America’s Cardroom, to bring a major online poker tournament to US players. It was billed as the first $1 million event in American online poker in nearly four years, as the events of Black Friday had more or less put an end to such prize pools in the country. Cancelled Despite Strong Turnout With a $500 + $40 buy-in and entry fee, the tournament needed 2,000 players to meet the prize guarantee (without dipping into the entry fees), and it appeared likely to do so. When the tournament was finally cancelled, 1,937 players had registered, and there were still about 45 minutes left in the late registration period. According to reports, the event was cancelled after less than five hours of play, though some players have said closer to 5.5 hours had elapsed by the time it was officially cancelled. Given how long the tournament had been running, a substantial number of players had already been eliminated; on the TwoPlusTwo.com forums, some players said they had hoped for some sort of chip split or ICM chop among the remaining players, given the large stacks they had accumulated in the first few hours of play. CEO Addresses Issues, Defends Decisions After the tournament, WPN CEO Phil Payton streamed a broadcast live on Twitch.tv to address the cancellation. “Call it a conspiracy, call it what you want, a lot of online poker sites have had Internet connectivity issues,” a clearly disappointed and frustrated Payton said. Payton referenced the fact that tournament issues were caused by DDoS attacks last weekend, but had seemed to clear up in the days before the big event. Whoever was causing the Internet disconnections was waiting for the million,” Payton said. “The second that it started, it started.” According to Payton, he and his staff initially tried to fight through it, but eventually came to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t fair to players who might be disconnected during key hands. “There’s a lot of sites that [would say] let them push through it, and we make $80,000, and gg,” Payton said. “Well, you know what, I’ve got to sleep with myself at night, and I’m not going to do that. “If it happened again tomorrow, I’d do the same thing,” he added. As Payton referenced, there have been an increasing number of DDoS attacks across online poker and the Internet at large. Just days earlier, players were suspicious about the possibility of DDoS attacks being used to disconnect opponents for the benefit of a specific player. Swedish operator Svenska Spel also had to cancel some poker tournaments last month following similar attacks and a massive Internet collapse in Sweden just last week is also blamed on DDoS hackers. In the end, given that the issues gave some players an advantage, Payton said that he was happy to stand by his decision, even if it was unpopular. “It doesn’t matter if you like it or not,” Payton said in response to questions about the decision at the end of his broadcast on Twitch. “It was fair.” Source: http://www.cardschat.com/news/wpn-1m-tournament-cxld-ddos-attack-8827
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Winning Poker Network $1M Guaranteed Tournament Cancelled After Apparent DDoS Attack
The channel mis-selling firewalls to their customers as protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks is partly to blame for the escalating number of attacks on enterprises. Dave Larson, CTO of Corero claims that tTraditional security solutions such as firewalls and IPS technology can’t handle the complexity of the modern DDoS attack – and even the more recent next generation firewalls can only provide a marginal benefit in fighting the attacks. Nevertheless, a survey conducted by Corero in 2013 had 40 percent of organisations stating they were relying on firewalls to protect them against DDoS attacks. “We see confusion in the market every day. DDoS protection vendors are fighting for mindshare with the end user community because there is still a vast misunderstanding about what DDoS is all about, and what it takes to eliminate the problem,” says Larson. “The problem is that firewall solutions are not well positioned to show the extent of the problem. Most organisations are shocked at the level and frequency of DDoS activity in their environment once they deploy a targeted in-line DDoS solution that is capable of exposing the threat.” He continues: “Proper DDoS protection is more than a ‘checkbox’ on a traditional security tool . Clicking the’DDoS on’ button on a firewall is not going to protect the business from the sophisticated and adaptive DDoS attacks that are taking down organisations, and distracting security teams from breach activity,” he explains. Larson concedes the channel is not deliberately advising customers to purchase the wrong protection, but “it is a matter of better education around why purpose built in-line appliance-based protection will allow their customers to properly defend against the modern DDoS attack landscape.” “There is no question that firewall technology is a tried and true security solution—a requirement for the majority of businesses. They key here is that that the channel can and should introduce dedicated DDoS protection as an additional layer to their overall security architecture. Implementing first line of defence technology to defeat DDoS at the very edge of the network allows all downstream technology infrastructure , like firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), to perform as intended. “There is a real opportunity for the channel to gain mind share , and ultimately revenue growth by understanding, and tapping into the DDoS market, this opportunity would complement the selling of traditional security solutions rather than replace them.” Source: http://www.channelpro.co.uk/news/8865/channel-mis-selling-firewalls-leads-to-ddos-attacks 
UK hosting company 1&1 went titsup late on Tuesday night and struggled to recover this morning, after claiming it had been the victim of a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The website collapsed shortly before 10pm yesterday, and it has taken 1&1 a full 12 hours to get its service back up and running. Readers who told the Reg about the outage said that the service had been flaky for several hours before it keeled over. 1&1 blamed the downtime on a DDoS attack in a tweet. However, although the website appeared to be returning to normal, 1&1 had yet to update its customers about the status of its system at time of writing. Customers were still griping about the mysterious outage this morning. Indeed, 1&1 was tight-lipped about the cause of the service disruption on its status page, which made no mention of a system security breach. Last month, Fasthosts blamed a five-hour outage it had suffered on a DDoS attack. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/1_and_1_hosting_firm_claims_ddos_attack_downs_website/