British Columbia Gaming Site Crashes

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What began as good news for online gaming in the Canadian province of British Columbia a week ago has run into serious problems. Last week British Columbia had become the first North American jurisdiction to legalize and regulate online gambling. The state owned British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) launched its online casino PlayNow. PlayNow went live with 75 online games casino covering the usual categories of blackjack, roulette, poker and others. On the very next day the server was down. The official version given out by BCLC president Michael Graydon was that the demand was so high that it became essential to add additional hardware. But when the site did not resume operations at the scheduled time it became apparent that the server had crashed due to overload.

Now there have been reports that private visitor information may have leaked during the crash. This has been confirmed by the British Columbia Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman. Coleman said to CTV News, "It does appear that some information - because of all the data hitting at once " might have been displayed on somebody’s computer, so we are dealing with that."

Insinuations that the crash was caused by a hacker and that the data could have been stolen are beginning to surface. The Vancouver Sun, which is covering this incident, spoke to Vaclav Vincalev, president of Pacific Coast Information Systems. Vincalev said that it is possible for hackers to fool a server into thinking it is overloaded. This can be done through ‘bots’, which are computers pretending to be players interacting at the site. An army of bots can generate significant traffic on a server. If the server is not prepared for this it can slow down and can ultimately crash. Vincalev added, "Once a site’s security has been breached, it is possible to steal information even when the website is still up and running, and to hack into any visitor’s computer." He summarized the situation by saying that BCLC went online without adequate preparation, whether it was without required hardware technology or underestimation of the number of users or inadequate protection against hackers.

This incident has given fuel to the political opposition parties. The main grouse seems to be the secrecy that the British Columbia provincial government is maintaining about the event, which is being attributed to its lack of preparedness. Shane Simpson, NDP critic for housing and social development told the Vancouver Sun newspaper, "But the most concerning thing is that the government and BCLC have not been definitive that there wasn't some kind of activity that breached the security of the site."

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