Cheltenham DDoS -- The Cheltenham Festival, one of Britain's largest betting events, began yesterday, and as expected, hackers have begun trying to skim off as much profit as they can by knocking betting sites offline through DDoS attacks and then holding them at ransom. Reports indicate that William Hill's service was targeted and temporarily disrupted last Thursday, and the same thing happened to betting exchange Betdaq on Friday. Totalbet and ukbetting were also brought down for some time yesterday. None of those four sites submitted to the ransom demands.
Poker Tourney -- The PartyPoker Million tournament has broken World Poker Tour records for participants and prize money. Five hundred forty-six players have paid the $7,000 entry fee for a chance to win a piece of the $3.8 million in prize money. The top 90 finishers will collect a prize, with the winner raking in a cool $1 million Last year's winner took home $263,850, when the prize pool was just $1 million and only 177 players signed up to play. The tournament's final table will be filmed on March 18 for broadcast on the Travel Channel.
P2P Hacking -- The Washington Post reports that computer hackers have begun using a Trojan horse that uses peer-to-peer (P2P) networking techniques similar to those used by file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. Security experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of personal and business computers across the world have been infected by the program Phatbot, which allows the authors to link infected computers to a P2P network so that they can be used to flood Web sites with DDoS attacks or to send massive amounts of spam. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security alerted security groups last week that Phatboot also tries to obtain user passwords and disable firewall and anti-virus software.
PlayMonteCarlo -- OpenTV's subsidiary BettingCorp UK is re-launching fixed-odds betting portal PlayMonteCarlo on Channel 7 on Sky Digital's interactive main menu with additional bandwidth on the satellite platform. PlayMonteCarlo, which offers soft fixed-odds games like slots, keno, dice and virtual horse racing for both free-play and real-money gambling, can also be accessed through the Sky Active portal and through OpenTV's PlayJam Channel 3.