[Cucumber]

I'm by no means a high stakes poker player, however I know my way around computers and actually worked for a few years as a computer security expert.

I have no idea of the security of the sites such as AP, however it is common knowledge (at least among initiated people such as me) that a LOT of sites and networks with very hardened security have been broken into, sometimes multiple times (I'm thinking of the world biggest banks, military institutions of leading countries, etc).

Once the security of a site compromised, a skilled, motivated intruder can do a lot of damage and sometimes gain access to the most sensitive information. There are plenty of very skilled pirates in the world, and if I was one of them, online gambling sites would probably be my premium targets, because:

1. Those sites are plenty, all can not be unbreakable.
2. Money on these sites is plenty and being traded constantly between accounts for small, medium and large sums.
3. You can steal money and make it look like nothing wrong happened (beating people at the games). It's pirate heaven.

Given those reasons, it would not surprise me if poker sites were under constant attack by the pirates from all over the world. Their security must be hardened, but there are so many ways to crack a system...Employees often being the path of least resistance.

Once in a system, the pirate could very easily set up a system that would let them know the hole cards of people they want. So much money is at stake that I can very well imagine a pirate putting a lot of time and effort to make a snooping system as close to be undetectable as possible - and that can be real damn stealth.

The remark of the AP's employee about "encryption" is void. The encryption will secure to some extent the data between the site and the client computer. The client computer itself is not more secure because of that encryption, nor is the poker site itself. A pirate breaking into the site would not worry about the encryption as it would not concern him at all. The remark about "data about other people hole cards not being sent to one's computer" is also silly for too many reasons to type.

My best suggestion would be to indeeed avoid playing on the sites that you suspect might be compromised. There is little chance of a big poker site (read: money making machine) admit to being cracked - this would be too much trouble.