Over the last few years, we have witnessed several major security breaches, including the GGPoker-specific one in late 2023, where a player was able to access hand equities and gain a significant edge over their opponents.
The most recent one came just a couple of weeks ago, exposing a number of high-stakes poker accounts by gaining access to their screens via an exploit in a third-party application.
As the world’s biggest online poker operator, GGPoker decided to take serious steps to prevent such breaches on its site in the future. The new security measures introduced within the GGPoker client are designed to tackle specific security issues and help players protect their accounts, identities, balances, and cards at all times.
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Game Client Security Settings Introduced
As part of its latest security overhaul, GGPoker has introduced a Game Client Security section within the Settings menu, where players can take full control over their security settings. Several new settings were added, each created specifically to help keep your account safer.
Screen Guard is a very useful feature that keeps your GGPoker tables and GGPoker lobby out of any screenshots, screen recordings, or remote-viewing apps. If any third-party software with screen sharing or recording options is running on your device, whether voluntarily or not, Screen Guard makes sure it cannot see your GGPoker tables. If you turn on the “Protect the whole Client” feature, your lobby, cashier, account, and history pages will also be protected.
Connection Monitor is another feature within the Game Client Security settings that alerts the player to any apps with suspicious connections that may be used to control your computer remotely.
The Allowed Processes feature allows you to mark processes you trust so they don’t trigger such warnings, while the DNS Check keeps watch over your network for any potential DNS hijacking.
Combined, these new features will help you keep much closer control over your security and reduce the risk of anyone gaining control of your device through any known methods.
Win Rate Anomaly Detection to Help Catch Cheaters
So far, most poker integrity checks have inspected poker hands for cases of collusion or suspicious play, but not for unusually high win rates that should not exist with any fair playing patterns.
GGPoker has introduced the “Abnormally High Win Rate” (WAD) inspection, which looks for accounts with unusually high win rates over a given sample size.
This new feature is the perfect solution for seeking out “super users” who may have access to their opponents’ cards, one way or another.
WAD was tested on previous samples of hands successfully and was able to detect cases of cheating that were already discovered through other measures, which confirmed its efficacy.
This new measure will help GGPoker track down cheaters even faster and ensure that all games on the platform are safe and perfectly balanced.
Third-Party Software Is History
To ensure that incidents like the most recent security breach that affected a number of high-stakes poker players can’t happen, GGPoker is banning all third-party tools on its platform.
From now on, players will have to turn off all third-party poker tools on their devices before they can run GGPoker and play real money games.
The list of affected apps includes Jurojin, PokerTracker 4, Hand2Note, Hold’em Manager 3, DriveHUD2, Equilab, and more.
While many of these apps were not allowed at GGPoker before, it will now not be possible to run the client at all while these are running, which will protect players from any potential security breaches within the apps.
GGPoker’s own integrated HUD, stats tracking, and other options will have to serve as the only sources of information for players on the platform, as all third-party tools are becoming a part of history.
Update Your Operating System to Keep Playing
Starting in 2027, GGPoker is also ending all support for old operating systems, such as Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and macOS 11 (BigSur).
From next year, players will have to use Windows 10 or newer and macOS 12 (Monterey) or newer to access GGPoker, as support for older operating systems will be discontinued.
The operator is making this move in order to protect players from any modern exploits and security risks associated with these older operating systems, and is asking players to update their operating systems in time to avoid any service interruptions.
With all the new security features in its most recent update, GGPoker is taking player integrity and security to the next level and making its platform one of the most secure in the entire online poker space.
