Well, if the government decides not to regulate the online poker industry we can always turn to Poker Table Ratings to hold the online poker sites accountable for their security. For the second time this year PTR has been able to expose a security issue at a major online poker room, this time Cake Poker. PTR is basically a data-mining site, where players can pay for hand histories; although many players take issue with PTR’s selling of hand histories, the site has been instrumental in uncovering not only security issues, but also cheating and collusion –they recently helped gather data on Nick “StoxTrader” Grudzien as well as the PokerStars bot scandal.

The breach at Cake Poker is almost identical to the one uncovered at the Cereus Poker network, which includes Absolute Poker and UB Poker, in May in that it allows a third party to intercept a player’s data, allowing access to account details as well as hole cards –players using unsecured wireless connections are the most vulnerable for this type of attack.

The security flaw has to do with encryption, and it turns out that both Cereus and Cake Poker were using less than adequate encryption for their communications –Cereus Poker has since upgraded their encryption to SSL, something Cake Poker will likely also do.

While it seems scary, having a watchdog group like PTR exposing these vulnerabilities will actually help the online poker sites in the long-run, making them more secure and accountable, since they know PTR will constantly be attempting to break their encryption.

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Tags: cake poker, Cake Poker Software, Poker Table Ratings

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