Betfair, one of the most popular online gaming companies on the planet, is now admitting that they suffered a major security leak in 2010. On March 14 of that year, a group of cyber-criminals broke into their system and made off with an immense amount of personal information belonging to Betfair users.
Most alarmingly of all, the victims of this attack were not made aware of the theft of their personal information. Though the incident occurred some 18 months ago, Betfair has just recently come forward.
The party responsible appears to have been based out of Cambodia, though few other details regarding their identity are available. Wherever they hailed from, the hackers managed to get away with an incredible amount of data. Great Britian’s Daily Telegraph newspaper initially broke the story after catching the company’s brief mention of the event among a long list of other Betfair news. The hackers, it appears, did quite the number on the company’s servers.
“They had,” the paper read, “subsequently stolen, among other things, 2.28m ‘encrypted payment card account numbers and details’, 3.16m ‘account user names with encrypted security questions’ and 89,744 “account usernames with bank account details’.”
The most important news here is that, despite the company’s inability to notify its users of any potential problems, the information itself was that, according to PokerNews, “security measures made the information unusable for fraud.”
The intrusion itself was not discovered until May 2010, when it was decided that any mention of this breach to the user base would hinder the course of Betfair’s investigation into the matter.