Joined: Mar '12
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 45 (F)
Posts: 2261
I just read an interesting article saying that Polands' finance ministry had been sending a bot into the Hendon Mob website which then gathered information.It didn't actually say what specific info it was looking for but my best guess would be the bot was looking for data on Polish players to determine tax etc? If you do not know about the Hendon Mob it is described as the "worlds largest database dedicated to live poker" and was acquired in 2013 by the Global Poker Index. The chief executive officer,Alexandre Dreyfus,from the GPI is quoted as saying......."Since December, we have seen a bot coming from the servers of mf.gov.pl that is crawling the whole website.........We have tried to fight it, and we blocked it." Unfortunately for the Polish Government it seems that the data it acquired was not going to be much use for the authorities as Dreyfus went on to explain....... "Our security team had noticed it from day one and, as we have a special tool that allows us to avoid automated bots to steal our data, we fed them with fake data and fake results for over eight days." According to the EU it is unlawful for governments to use data obtained this way and Hendon Mob have warned the Polish Finance Ministry and stated that they intend to pursue legal action. The response from Poland is great......it came via Twitter from Jacek Kapica,who is Poland's Deputy Finance Minister........."I do not know about that, I’m on vacation,"
Joined: Jun '13
Location: Canada
Age: 80 (M)
Posts: 3700
Very nice answer from a Deputy Finance NInister I dont know what my employees are doing while i am on vacation. Whe i com back i will ,ake an investigation regarding this problem and i am sure i wont find any wrong doing from my employees.
Joined: Mar '12
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 45 (F)
Posts: 2261
What I like about this is that Government officials are using Twitter and Facebook more and more to discuss very serious issues and we all know this will end badly when their accounts get hacked or they are sending compromising selfies by mistake.
