VICTORIA – The British Columbia government’s online gambling site was shutdown because of a privacy breach, B.C. Lottery Corp. officials confirmed in a news release Tuesday.
Company officials said that when PlayNow.com was relaunched last Thursday as the first government-sanctioned online casino in North America, 134 accounts were left exposed and open to any other player to access.
Twelve of the accounts had "a measure of sensitive personal information viewed by another player," officials added, giving no further details.
All players who were affected by the breach have been contacted, officials said.
The announcement comes after extensive criticism from the New Democratic Party.
Shane Simpson, NDP critic for housing and social development, said the government should have been open from the start about the privacy breach.
"They’re expecting people to put significant personal information and credit card information on there," said Simpson. "The government simply has to be more transparent if they want people to have confidence in their site."
PlayNow’s home page shows the message: "Your browser was not able to connect to the remote site, probably because they are too busy or having problems. Please try refreshing your browser, or try again later."
BCLC officials initially said the website crashed because of unexpected high traffic overloading the server.
In an interview Friday, BCLC vice-president of corporate affairs Kevin Gass said the site was taken down because of heavy traffic that lead to "slowness" on the site.
He said the company had taken the site off-line only to "err on the side of caution."
According to one technology consultant, it is possible for hackers to fool a server into thinking it is overloaded.
"A hacker can unleash an army of sleeping computers called ‘bots,’ which can start generating traffic on a server and overwhelm it," said Vaclav Vincalev, president of Pacific Coast Information Systems, a Vancouver technology consulting firm. "If the site is not prepared for it, it would become extremely slow or crash in the end."
He said once a site’s security has been breached, it is possible to steal information even when the website is still up and running.
"The bottom line is (BCLC) was not prepared to go online," he said. "Whether they were not prepared with enough technology, underestimated the number of users, or did not expect to get attacked . . . they just underestimated what they were doing."
In the Tuesday news release, BCLC said PlayNow.com will be restored "when a solution is implemented that meets the highest levels of player protection and receives third party approval and regulatory certification."
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