Several high stake pros report being hacked, including Selbst, Rousso, Smith

Several high-stakes poker players informed at Twitter over the last couple days that their accounts had been hacked. Vanessa Selbst, Vanessa Rousso, Cate Hall, and Dan Smith were some of the victims, with hackers gaining access to accounts ranging from cell phones to Twitter accounts.

Dan Smith was one of the first to bring the problem to public. According to poker pro Doug Polk, who released a YouTube video breaking down the situation, some victims have had hackers call their cell phone service providers posing as the account owner and getting the victims' service switched to a new phone – creating some unique opportunities to gain access to accounts.

“Now they have your phone number and can call or text whoever,” Polk said via YouTube. “And you can think about a lot of accounts online that do verification through SMS. Let's say that I lost my password to some account and I wanted to have it recovered. They could say, ‘We're texting your phone number the verification code to reset your password to one.' Well, if it send to your phone, but [the hackers] have your phone they can reset the account and you can see how they can get into a lot of accounts.”

“I know other people who have been getting hacked, but just have not come forward publicly,” Polk added.

Only a couple days ago, Rousso's Twitter account had apparently been hacked with Tweets going out saying she was in trouble and that someone needed to help her. She later announced she had been hacked and her account taken over.

Poker player Cate Hall was also the victim of hacking and reportedly had her Facebook and Twitter accounts overtaken.

Selbst Tweeted that someone had apparently gone through her cell phone provider claiming to be her and seeking to change her pin number.
“Anything you back with text messaging, which any do for Gmail, is vulnerable,” Polk noted in his video. “They got access to her Gmail and all kinds of different things, but did not get access to her Bitcoin or anything like that because those accounts had 2FA that were not through text.”

There is not a complete accounting of how many poker players were affected, why they were chosen, or if it is mere coincidence several were victimized at roughly the same time. However, many in the poker community believe high-stakes players are an obvious target because of their larger bankrolls and ease of finding out personal information from the Internet to help bypass cell phone companies security protocols.

There's some blackhat conference where they demonstrate how stupid easy this is. For instance a woman calls T-mobile with some sort of technical issue, pretends to have kids and a screaming baby and stuff stressing her out, acting all flustered like she's just exhausted after a long day of work, and gets the idiot rep to change the SIM# to her own and presto, all calls rerouted to a new phone. Another one is just some dude calling in pretending to be the manager of a Verizon "authorized reseller", which is basiscally one of those Verizon stores you see that are filled with plastic dummy phones unlike an actual Verizon store with working demo equipment. The reps have no way of really verifying anything, he just says "yeah dude buddy i have a customer here, this is store #227 just change the fucking sim" or something to that effect and once again they deliver.

they need to take it easy on the "hacking" term and just tell it as it is, be careful and don't put your entire life in something people regularly lose on the reg or can be controlled by a outsourced rep from india or the philippines

On May 29 2017 11:08 NewbSaibot wrote: There's some blackhat conference where they demonstrate how stupid easy this is. For instance a woman calls T-mobile with some sort of technical issue, pretends to have kids and a screaming baby and stuff stressing her out, acting all flustered like she's just exhausted after a long day of work, and gets the idiot rep to change the SIM# to her own and presto, all calls rerouted to a new phone. Another one is just some dude calling in pretending to be the manager of a Verizon "authorized reseller", which is basiscally one of those Verizon stores you see that are filled with plastic dummy phones unlike an actual Verizon store with working demo equipment. The reps have no way of really verifying anything, he just says "yeah dude buddy i have a customer here, this is store #227 just change the fucking sim" or something to that effect and once again they deliver.

thanks for the info