On Tuesday, the Equity Poker Network confirmed that its game servers have been suffering from distributed denial of service attacks, or DDOS. The press release outlined, “The DDOS attacks at EPN have occurred intermittently across the past six weeks, causing some short-term disruptions to Network connectivity and frustrating poker room outages.” In most cases, Equity developers were quickly able to remedy the issue.

The Network’s flagship site, Full Flush Poker, has been plagued by outages, many ranging between 30 and 60 seconds. EPN officials promised a resolution to the attacks despite their brevity, commenting in the same release, “We are working behind-the-scenes to strengthen the network mechanisms and structures necessary to deal with such assaults on our operations and we hope to reach a solution shortly that will fix the outages our network’s operators and their players have had to endure during recent times.”

DDOS attacks have seemingly occurred in bunches recently, targeting the Merge Gaming Networkand also perhaps causing last weekend’s $1 million guaranteed tournament on the Winning Poker Network to be canceled after four-and-a-half hours. Merge, Winning, and Equity all accept US players, but are not regulated in the US. Therefore, PocketFives does not recommend playing on any associated site, as your account balances could be at risk.

Rather than speculate that the DDOS attacks are being targeted at Equity specifically, network officials said the interruptions were part of a “more calculated wider assault on online poker businesses.” A separate press release sent from Full Flush add that “at no time throughout these attacks has the security of [players’] data ever been compromised.”

DDOS attacks are essentially a coordinated group of computers sending large number of false data requests to a system like Equity, Winning, or Merge. Eventually, the system becomes so overloaded responding to fake requests that it ends up being unable to fulfill legitimate ones, causing outages. As the CEO of Winning said on Monday, in order to block unwanted traffic to the network, developers can inadvertently block regular user traffic.

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