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Posted here:
http://www.egamingtoday.com/Article/...ker/Rogue.html
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this consultant devised a sophisticated scheme to manipulate internal systems to <u>access third-party computers and accounts to view hole cards of other customers during play</u> without their knowledge.
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Absolute Poker just admits here that there were "third-party computers and accounts" able to "view hole cards of other customers during play". They did not claim this "high-ranking" employee created the system to view hole cards, only that he "manipulate[d] internal systems to access" such systems.
That is completely inexcusable. There is <u>no legitimate purpose</u> even for the most sophisticated security, fraud and collusion detection systems, to have access to hole cards in play. Everything that needs to be done, can be done, the second the hand has completed.
There are two other plausible explanations that makes sense in context of absolute poker's statement, but both would a be a scandal of equal or greater proportions themselves. 1) that the AP poker client takes screenshots of player's computers and sends those back to AP or 2) the AP poker client provides concurrent remote access (view desktop) to the player's computer to AP upon demand.
Note, some programs do take screenshots to detect robot play and other cheats (World of Warcraft uses such). However, these rely on pattern recognition, the patterns sent to the client -- the screenshots
never leave the client computer.
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I think you are correct, but in jumping to conclusions bypassing some obvious possibilities. You seem to take for granted that access of the hole cards was done through the "sophisticated security, fraud and collusion detection systems". That would be a very roundabout way to do it. Such a system probably only needs to work with finished hand histories stored in a database. But regardless of system architecture, somewhere is the information about the hole cards, and this information is readily available for several different purposes: - sending information about their hole cards to the clients - using the hole card information if a disconnected client is considered 'all in' - deciding who wins a showdown - writing the finished hand to a database.
The information is thus available in the system. There is no need to go all the way to retrieve the information in various ways from the clients through screenshots and remote access. A person in the company, behind the firewall, with good knowledge of the internal system, would know where the hole card information is temporarily stored during the play of a hand.