The internet-based casino has undergone the latest hackers’ attack. Now it is suffering from harsh extortion. Gala E-Commerce was the aim of the latest cyber assault, the result of which was the shutting the casino down for over ninety minutes.

Peter Bassill, the Head of Internet Security in the internet-based casino, explained that the hackers used a more complicated attack to achieve such a tremendous result. Concerning this attack, the hackers collected personal information of players and stolen credit cards for more than four months, before starting an abrupt mass personal accounts’ infiltration held at the casino.

For the period of this attack, thirty thousand computers were used as bots with the intention of duplicating the patterns commonly used by the real customers. Additionally, the bots were developed to block their firewall that resists the penetration of hackers into the site.

In accordance with the Gala Coral, similar attacks can frequently incur demands of over 100,000 dollars, and they are expected to happen about twice a year. Bassill remarked that the ability of hackers to permeate a casino similarly suggests evidently an equal ability to infiltrate bigger and more powerful companies, for example the nuclear power ones.

Per se, Peter Bassill and the other members of the casino staff suppose that the problem of internet hacking has turned into a national security case, and per se they have applied for farther assistance to law enforcement authorities.

In spite of the bad year of 2007, Neteller, the online eWallet, is optimistic concerning 2008. In its interview with “eGaming Review”, internet gaming magazine, Ron Martin, Neteller’s present Chief Executive, made a great “casino gambling parallel” referring to the 2007events as a way by which Neteller could just clear the decks to go forward into 2008 without surprises standing by.

In 2007, when the Department of Justice of the U.S.A. were taking down Chief Executive Officer’s outfits of online gambling right and left, a “surprise” appeared and hung over the top payment eWallet. Taking into account that the USA has been facing ¬internet-based gambling industry a lot, Neteller depended mainly on the American market.

However, Neteller has been aiming currently on the Asian and European markets. Luckily, the company didn’t put everything in the market of the USA, and thus in spite of suffering deprivation in North America (together with Canada), the injured online gambling old hand allocated the rest of its resources.

CEO asserts that there’re still numerous challenges for Neteller in the coming 2008. But, since the company restructures its business operations, including a plan to have more non-gaming customers to its list, therefore diversifying its own revenue and making the eWallet have more scalability for its betting clients. In other words, not to stop its current gaming services, the company’s aim is to take for a non-gaming business.

After the big settlement with the Department of Justice of the USA, which Neteller made its final 38.25 million dollars payment to clear in this January, the company managed to make pre-tax 9.4 million dollars profits. Stock trading has already showed the growth for the first 3 months of this year, there are no limits for Neteller in the year 2008.

A single line Slot machine, Alchemist’s Lab, at the internet-based Europa Casino, has made one more impressive payout. Recently the classic Slot paid off an incredible €10,000 prize. This big prize was given after getting a winning combination on a 20 Euros wager. Joerg W was the winner, a new customer to Europa Casino. Alchemist’s Lab is considered to be a favourite at the internet-based casino, and has the huge repertoire of more than one hundred games with nineteen progressive jackpots.

Joerg W from Germany started playing at Europa Casino in the beginning of February, 2008 and was pleased to hear that he had won the huge prize just 5 days later after he had joined the casino. In his interview to Europa Casino, Joerg said he could not believe his eyes after he saw how big his win is. He was very excited and at ease, especially after receiving the confirmation from the customer support of the casino.

Joerg stated as well that though he had been always fascinated by Roulette, he was a fan of the Slots now after this win. Joerg wants to do some things for home improvements using his winnings.

Europa offers a lot of special features including the opportunity for players to perfect their skills and get to know new strategies with the help of the option ‘Play for Fun’. In the ‘Real Money’ mode, Europa offers valuable help sections, which give customers all the assistance and guidance they require.

Upcoming Promotions

World Series of Poker - The network will launch WSOP satellites on March 30 with the first Super Satellite on April 6. For the first time, there will be two promotions run in parallel. One promotion will give winning players a $14,000 Package to the WSOP Main event (Event 54). The second promotion will give winning players a $6,500 Package to 2 NLH side events (Event 27 & Event 32).

iPoker will also launch an “Executive Package” ($20,000) to the main event, offering a luxury hotel room, as well as other perks. Details to follow.

$500,000 Guaranteed - On April 6, the network will stage a $500,000 Guaranteed Prize tournament instead of the weekly Sunday night main freezeout tournament. From the following Sunday, the weekly tournament will guarantee $250,000 in prizes.

Billionth Hand Promotion - iPoker has announced that we will pass our 1,000,000,000 hand dealt sometime in May. We will have a promotional countdown starting in April, with a total of $300,000 in prizes. The winner of the billionth hand, for example, will win $50,000! A request has been sent for Graphics to design a banner for this promotion.

New Players Special - TitanPoker and TonyGPoker will stage a New Players $4000 Freeroll and a New Players $1000 Freeroll on March 31. Eligibility will be awarded to January-February first depositors and non-depositing players who received Instant Bankroll/PokerStrategy quiz bonus in those months based on the number of Points earned between March 16 and March 23. Players who generate more than 1,000 Points will play in the $4000 Freeroll, and players who generate 500-999 Points will play in the $1000 Freeroll.

VIP Loyalty Race - TitanPoker will stage a $15,000 VIP Loyalty Race between March 26 and March 30. The final details are not yet determined, but the race will feature an automatically-updated leaderboard, where players can see that the more they play, the closer they get to the prizes. You can see the final results and the leaderboard of our just completed VIP Loyalty Race (Diamond and Titanium players, March 9-12) here:
http://www.titanpoker.com/leaderboard.html

April Fools - TitanPoker and TonyGPoker will stage a $5,000 April Fools tournament on April 1. Eligibility will be awarded to VIP players (Silver and up) who play in 12 or more scheduled Hold’em tournaments between March 23 and March 31.

Ongoing Promotions

ECPT Madrid Open = TitanPoker sponsored event in Madrid in May. There are currently two Super Satellites a week - Sundays ($250 + $25) and Tuesdays ($50 + $5, with re-buys and add-on). Network tournaments start on March 26 with Super Satellites on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Winning players will receive a $3,000 package including to the 1,000 Euro buy-in tournament hosted at the Casino Gran Madrid. Three TitanPoker players have already won their seats.

ECOOP II = The ECOOP II series starts May 23 and will run for 10 days with $3.6 Million guaranteed in total. The Main Event is the ECOOP II #10 $1,500,000 tournament on June 1. Satellites are already running.

EPT San Remo = Network promotion. Final Super Satellite on March 22. Winning players will receive a $10,000 package including buy-in the Main Event at EPT San Remo in April.

EPT Monte Carlo - Network promotion. Runs through the end of March. Winning players will receive a $20,000 package including buy-in the Main Event at EPT Monte Carlo in April.

New Depositors = We are staging 5 New Depositors tournaments a week (Saturday to Wednesday) each awarding a $600 prize. Players will be able to choose the electronic gift they want to receive.

Winter Poker League - TitanPoker and TonyGPoker promotion. League tournaments continue until March 22. The winners advance to the Winter Poker $50,000 Freeroll on March 30 and/or the Winter Poker Winners $10,000 on March 31.

Omaholics - Network promotion. Awarding $100,000 to Omaha Pot Limit players based on their raked hands. Promotion runs through the end of March.

WPS Ocean World = TitanPoker promotion. Final Super Satellite on April 27. Two players have already won $9,000 packages to the World Poker Showdown Ocean World event in the Dominican Republic in May.

A guest and a lucky casino player were awarded a 6 day luxury holiday in the Bahamas as the giveaway at the Everest Casino Atlantis.

The player is from Italy, he’ll enjoy all the perquisites of a Caribbean holiday that include airfare and comfort accommodations in the Atlantis Resort and Casino in the Bahama Islands. He has also received 1,000 dollars in cash to spend in his trip.

Everest Casino property manager, Eduardo Santos said they certainly wanted to give this lucky player a chance that may be once in a life to experience the Atlantis for free. They’d certainly like him to do this with 1,000 dollars in their pockets!”

Coming into the Atlantis promotion was fun and simple. The promotion began in January and players could simply enter ATLANTIS08, the coupon code with a casino deposit that they made in January. Afterward, for each 250 dollars in total wagers on any casino games there, players got an extra entry just into the drawing. A gambler could double his chances to win the grand prize of the Bahamas vacation as well by depositing 250 dollars to play any games of the Everest Casino Atlantis.

Playtech was turned out of the online gambling market of the USA without notice. But it’s an example for the internet casinos companies which were forced out in the same way. Some of the companies serviced the USA before are still having difficulties and making efforts to find a niche in the markets of Europe and Asia. On the other hand Playtech is nearly wholly recovered and even has established some important licensing deals and partnerships during the past year. The revenue from acquired internet-based casino businesses and partnerships made a contribution into the strong 2007 year-end report of the company.

Playtech reorganized to accommodate the growing European casinos market and promising Asian-Pacific online gaming industry; and all these paid off in the end. Playtech is a partner of the Asian-facing AsianLogic and there is a prepared development deal that ensures the company a place in the emerging online casinos and poker gambling industry of Asia.

Fifteen new licensees of Playtech and the purchase of the Tribeca poker network are certainly to help to get the positive year-end revenues. The main aim of the casinos gambling group is to acquire new licensees and though fifteen was definitely a great amount of new licensees in 2007, Playtech is going to surpass that number the current year.

The non-executive Playtech chairman, Roger Withers said that the company continues expanding quickly with increased development of the product in new markets that leads to numerous new important revenue streams. On the whole, Playtech expanded its product effectively and focused on the outside with respect to expanding the company’s universal reach. And whilst that wouldn’t effectively work for all the gambling companies, this strategy contributed over a hundred million dollars in 2007 revenue.

Harrah Entertainment, the US brick and mortar casino giant, has just approached the owners of Gala Casinos, the offline and online British casino chain, to discuss a merger just between these 2 companies.
Harrah is interested in forming a British casino company that would consist of forty facilities in the United Kingdom combining the LCI (Harrah London Clubs International) and the Gala Coral Group Gala Casinos which run also the Gala Maybury in the Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh.
Just three months ago a similar offer was made by the LCI to Rank, they proposed to swap the LCI business for a 28% stake in the very successful Rank Group. However, the Rank CEO, Ian Burke, didn’t support that proposal. In accordance with UK casino experts, amalgamating Harrah Entertainment and a major United Kingdom casino chain might pose very grave challenges to local competitors, the Stanley Casino chain included that has the Circus Casino and Maxims Casino, and Grosvenor Casinos of Rank, they’re the second major operators in the casino industry of the UK.
But, experts must yet bear out whether or not the latest proposition of Harrah to Gala, being essentially an asset for impartiality swap, would be an absolute sellout of the London Clubs International. The LCI was the first try of Harrah to break into the United Kingdom casino market, and purchased it together with Ceaser’s Palace for 300 m. pounds in Las Vegas. Gala and Harrah have rejected to comment on their talks about a merger.

Online bingo is supposed to be the fastest increasing gambling market at present. Thus it isn’t astonishing to see bingo sites that start offering huge prizes, due to the great amount of bingo fans that make their way to the favourite online sites. Lately, London site Mecca Bingo announced that it’d offer a guaranteed a USD 200,000 prize, the largest prize for a game of bingo in this type of entertainment history.
The new game of Mecca Monster will start on 28th March and will cost almost 6 dollars for each game. Each 90-ball full house game winner from this time till the Mecca Monster beginning will get a free ticket to take part in the game. Mecca Bingo holds regular tournaments. It has got a big portfolio of other most wanted casino games with profitable prizes.

Popular online poker room Titan Poker, will power Eurocity Poker Tour Madrid Open this May.

The fastest growing online poker room, Titan Poker , will sponsor the first of many “land based” tournaments this May in Madrid, Spain. Qualifying Satellites for the Eurocity Poker Tour (ECPT) Madrid Open are already taking place, as players vie for seats to this exclusive tournament.

Attendance at the luxurious Casino Gran Madrid is limited to 200 highly-skilled players. Those who qualify will be winning much more than just a place at this event. Titan Poker will be treating the participating players with a generous package valued at $3,000. Two round-trip airline tickets from anywhere in Europe to Madrid, accommodations for three nights for themselves and a guest, two dinners and entry to the 1,000 Euro buy-in tournament hosted at the Casino Gran Madrid will be awarded to the top players.

Titan Poker is busy preparing a sophisticated poker experience, with hopes of making Titan Poker powered land-based events a regular occurrence. “At the rate of our expansion, and considering the number of players we are sending to tournaments every month, it only makes sense that Titan Poker should take it to the next level,” said a spokeswoman for the company. “We are already making a huge presence at these tournaments. Now that Titan Poker is the sponsor, it will just be more visible!”

In addition to the ECPT Madrid Open TitanPoker is presently offering a wide array of opportunities for its players to bring their “virtual” love of poker into real life poker tournaments. The Irish Open hosted in Dublin is the most imminent tournament happening later this month at Titan Poker. In May, the destination is the Dominican Republic for the World Poker Showdown Ocean World for qualifying Titan Poker players.

Computer hackers do all they can to find private information and the most recent attacks have hit gambling sites. Poker and casino sites have been besieged by extortionists now and system shutdowns are caused by the cyber sabotage. Their gambling websites had to be closed by Gala Coral E-Commerce due to a 30 minutes cyber attack on their server systems, just one of the sites that have fallen victim to the cyber crime.
In accordance with Peter Bassill, head of internet security of Gala Coral, the hackers have worked on the main cyber attack for 4 months at least. Hackers have set up accounts on the sites of the company by means of credit card information which had been stolen previously. After the attack happened, the company realized that 30 thousand personal computers have just been set up as bots, pretending legitimate customers and causing the system to be wide shutdown. The bots managed to block one of their port firewalls; they sent information through in a cyber siege to the websites. The firewall still was functioning and trying to stop the attack nevertheless it couldn’t recompense the overloaded information.
The hacking efforts aren’t simply standard attacks. The company asserts they’ve got demands by these attacks for more than 100 thousand dollars, sabotaging the gambling sites family after the demands aren’t met. Gala Coral says this takes place about two times a year and is looking for law enforcement agencies help to stop it from coming about again. Gala Coral’s representatives also has pointed that these attacks are a national security subject, they say that if the hackers are able to sabotage any gambling website, they might sabotage anything more important, for example nuclear power stations or utility companies.
Gala Coral has spoken a lot about the hackers’ ability and alas this isn’t a film scenario. Demands for the money have preceded the hackers’ attacks, so they are starting to move the protection business on the Internet. Hitherto other casino sites haven’t announced that the websites have been their cyber crimes victims, but we can’t say that it’s happened.
Anybody who considers they can be a cyber attack or fraud victim ought to contact and report the local law enforcement at once. If the fraud has been committed with the help of a credit card, ensure you have deactivated the card as soon as you can. You are sure to inform the website as well that you suppose the crime has happened in order that they know perhaps there’s something illegal taking place there backstage and can scrutinize it.