Lock Poker blames software provider for privacy flaw

03/14/2012 :  PRIVACY PROBLEMS AT LOCK POKER?
 
Online poker operator blames software provider for privacy flaw
 
Following its inability to timeously detect a $100 000 chip-dump in the Macedo affair last year , you would think that internet poker operator Lock Poker would be on its toes and all too well aware that alert players are formidable detectives when it comes to flaws and screw-ups.
 
Yet this week the operator was accused of serious violations of confidentiality and privacy when a player went public on the twoplustwo message board to highlight a software shortcoming which exposed customers’ usernames and passwords, and furthermore stored these in plain text accessible by the site's employees.
 
Exacerbating the incident, the player who uncovered the fault, ‘Deafeye’, claimed that he had warned the company mid-2011 about the fault, and was resorting to public exposure out of frustration that nothing had been done about it.
 
Lock Poker, or a poster claiming to represent Lock Poker, responded to the posts rather belatedly, apparently laying blame at the door of software provider RTG.
 
Posting as ‘LockRizen', this individual claimed that the mid-2011 breach reported by Deafeye had been addressed by the company, and was caused by a software update from RTG which broke the site's encryption.
 
Lock Poker had therefore fixed the original problem, he alleged, only to have the same thing happen again more recently when RTG pushed through another update, with the same result.
 
"We have taken steps to ensure that future updates won’t cause this to happen again," LockRizen concluded. "No one should be seeing it anymore, and if for some reason someone does please let me know about it ASAP so I can have the appropriate people look at it.'
 
The statement does little to inspire confidence in the operator's ability to keep on top of key issues that have previously caused hassles.