Originally Posted by Mohsen
Hi everyone.
I am going to explain to you what is going on recently at WPN on some level of technicality so you might understand the situation a little better.
I'm a player at ACR myself , Cashgame , Micro Player (Not even a grinder!) playing 2-3 tables 10NL max!
And I'm not connected to ACR or anything. But I guess some explanation on the situation might help some people on this frustrating time.
So , What's a DDOS? (Simplified)
I have a Website. My website has a network that can accept 5000 viewers per second.
Now all of a sudden , somebody with control of a huge network of over 50.000 Nodes (devices) start to open my website in 1 second.
Booom , My website can't answer any other viewers. That's Called DOS (Denial Of Service)
Now , imagine 20 people with the same amount of devices available to them , from 20 different places run their attack (viewing my website) at the same time. now I have what , 1,000,000 viewers !!!!! That's called Distributed Denial Of Service.
How can we stop it?
First of all , It's really hard to mitigate a simple DOS attack , But imagine the attack is much bigger scale!
BUT a simple explanation on how the tech team is working on mitigating the attack at the moment:
Remember I told you there is 50.000 devices trying to view our website? (In this case , Open poker client app)
We have to identify WHO is really our customer and WHO is just a crazy dude who is attacking us. Drop the request from crazy dude and allow our customers to get through.
"Why can't you upgrade your internet connection to support 50,000,000 viewer per second" You might ask! The answer is , even if we do that , a person whose running this sort of attack is powerful enough to visit our site 50X as much as we can support! So believe me when I say it can't get fixed by throwing money at it and upgrade the uplink..
So , We go through some logs that we have of attacker and see some patterns on it. (For example , You will see a lot of IP's from a Country named X and Y trying to attack you.) btw , IP (short for Internet Protocol) is a unique identifier that everyone connects to internet has his/her own.
We close our website to them using our firewall. in the very next few minutes , We see attacks start all over again with a different set of IPs.. And this process goes on and on!
So WHAT WE DO?
We have to DENY everybody's access to website EXCEPT the ones we now are real.(Not bots , Not hacked servers etc..)
How can we do it?
We gather information through the web that tells us about well-known attacker's IPs. And will tell us the list of IP's that are real and in the hand of Customers (Not some shady Hosting provider that is known to serve attackers!)
It takes time to list ALL of the true IP's of people.
And like any other IT matter , there is ALWAYS False positive involved.
you might be blocked by mistake... You might not be "White-Listed" yet.
That's why some people can access the servers , And some Can't.
My suggestions to you:
# DO NOT USE any sort of Proxy , VPN , etc... to get access to site. Most of the proxy/VPN servers are listed as "NO People" at databases.
# Stay away from MTTs until a formal confirmation of REPS.
# for SNGs or Cashgames , start with a small game and check your status. If your okay at 2NL (Don't see any lags etc...) You will be OK at 2000NL as well.
### I suggest If it's possible for you at the moment , Don't try to play and wait for the tech team to finish their job.
And think about this , How much Can you earn per hour? $10? $20? $500? $10,000 ?
How much WPN can earn per hour? (I'm not saying numbers :-D ) Beside the fact that there are a massive amount of people who will stop using WPN and their reputation will suffer from this situation in the long run.
Bottom line is , This is WAAAAAAY more -EV for them than it's for us (Players)
So stop blaming WPN for this and be realistic.
Sorry for my English. (Second language in a third world country) and for a LOOOOng letter.
I hope this post can help some of you guys to chill a bit.
Cheers.