Online casinos that want to be successful have to offer certain features and have particular traits. Every online gambler wants to feel safe during game play, knowing that their personal information will not be accessed by others. Every online casino will use special encryption software and take all precautions to ensure that consumer information is handled perfectly, never seen by hackers or outside eyes.
However, despite the normal precautions by online casinos, hackers can gain access. When this happens, casinos must take action to stop the information of players from leaking. Providers will announce when a data breach takes place and the most recent incident of a data breach involves an online casino known as Coinroll, a site provided by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a provider of digital currency that is used for online gaming as well as shopping and other areas.
The account data of Coinroll was compromised in March and the breach was detected when a researcher for MacKeeper discovered the issue. Chris Vickery works for the online security firm and discovered that an online data base existed that held information from accounts of Coinroll. All in all, a total of 4,610 accounts from Coinroll were accessed. Softpedia has reported that the information from Coinroll that was breached was connected to 9.668 Bitcoin wallets.
To tackle security issues, the database of Coinroll was using SHA256, a cryptographic algorithm for account password strings. However, the database did not have random info spread throughout and this would have made the passwords oblivious to prying hackers. An administrative password was not in place which allowed anyone to download the information. A big no-no which caused all the personal information to leak.
Last week, a message was placed on the website of Coinroll which alert members of the potential breach. The message was put in place after reports were received by the company that certain users account balances were stolen. According to Coinroll, only a few claims had come through in regards to unauthorized withdrawals of funds but players were advised to change the password of their account if the account was opened before April 7th.
Withdrawal and deposit options were temporarily shut down at Coinroll while the company began an investigation of the data breach. To try and combat any further issues such as this, Coinroll stated they would be taking further steps to prevent such breaches from happening again. A two-factor authentication would be added for withdrawals of the online casino gaming accounts as one added measure of security.
This past Monday, the chat logs of the site showed that functions for withdrawal and deposit may be put back in working order by next week but possibly sooner than that. Vickery also reported that Juan-Samuel Codina Fauteux, the marketing and affiliate manager of Coinroll, stated that the leak within the database was the result of an update to the Ubuntu operating system used by Coinroll.
Apparently the update changed settings unknowingly in the UFW firewall of Ubuntu’s configuration tool. Coinroll plans on trying OS Fedora, a Linux-based operating system instead of continuing to use Ubuntu to avoid this type of issue in the future. Despite the changes the company intends to make and the fact they feel the issue was due to software updates, Coinroll did admit they did not have any administrative passwords in place for the database.
It will be interesting to see the full impact of this case and just exactly what Coinroll will be doing to try to avoid data breaches in the future. When players feel unsafe they will avoid game play, so it is imperative for Coinroll to get back on track if they hope to remain successful.
