Cheating at AP, updated cliff notes

[Johnny#5]

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1) the team at Absolute that created the hand-dealing algorithm would approve their software having this feature. I would hope no single person would be allowed to design such a critical part of the program without oversight from others and they would stop such an egregious programming flaw from being implemented. However, after reading these threads it seems all bets are off concerning rigorousness from AP. Maybe the person went in and modified the program later without anyone noticing, I guess you can't put anything past AP.

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If this part of the program was put in at the highest levels, it's certainly possible. Just a theory, mind you. If I was writing the software I wouldn't write anything to the database to have anything to query until the hand was complete, so the only thing that would know what the state of the current hand was would be the server application's current memory.

Another possibility combines the two ideas; an account that causes all hands to be sent instead of just the user's hand. Or maybe the code that sends all the cards requires the player to be an observer because that's done with a different part of the code? And is the location of the leak?

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2) If this information was being sent out to all players I would think that somebody with much more computer savvy than me would have noticed that "extra" information was being sent from the Absolute servers and, even if they didn't know what is was or how to handle the encryption, they would have made it public before now. I suppose, though, that if someone did somehow crack the encryption he would probably keep it to himself and utilize it for profit. Maybe someone did that, told his buddies and now there is a legion of cheats out there, who knows?

Does this make sense?

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How many people do you honestly think analyze network data to look for holes like that? Absolute Poker has about 2400 cash players on it at most at any given time. Lets say that it has 20000 total cash players (probably a very high estimate I would guess). How many of those do you think are software savvy enough to either 1) hack the encryption (without knowing what algorithm it is), or 2) decompile the program and look through the assembly to figure out the packet format after it's stored? These, while not impossible, are not trivial programming tasks and things I would expect only from very experienced hackers.

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Like I said I'm not a computer expert. But I don't think the hacker pool is limited to poker players. For instance, many of the bot programmers supposedly aren't really poker guys, they're game theory computer nerds instead. Maybe the hacker wouldn't have to break the encryption itself, maybe he could hack a different AB server and steal the encryption key. Or maybe he could buy off someone in AP and have it leaked to him. I don't know.