Stories occasionally circulate the Internet about Poker Trojans, mini programs that sneak on to your system hiding as something useful but which actually do more harm than good. Like the Trojans in their Wooden Horse, these nasty programs can reveal your private data, and when you are online playing poker, that info could include your hole cards. Read on to learn how to avoid these Poker Trojans.
Sign up with Paddy Power Poker for a safe, free poker odds calculator!
Let's say you are surfing the web and you find a neat little application that helps you keep track of your bookmarks. You download it, install it, run it discover it isn't as useful as you thought, and moe than likely forget about it.
Big mistake.
Hidden in the code of this "friendly little application" is a nasty piece of spy-kit doing dirty deeds. Perhaps it is recording your key strokes and sending them off to its owner, who will search for your banking pass codes or something similar. This idea is not new (at least as long as the internet has been around) but there is a strong possibility to catch out a lot of new victims as online poker continues to boom.
Poker Trojans are often hidden within poker odds calculators. These bugs will respond to a remote command to take a screen capture and send it along to the person you are playing against, giving them your pocket cards, and thus the unfair edge needed to clean you out.
While Poker Trojan victims are often singled out and specifically targeted because they do well online and have big bankrolls (the more to steal), anyone can potentially be a target.
Fortunately there are some high quality tools that you can use that come from trusted sources. Paddy Power Poker has a fantastic poker odds calculator that is way ahead of the curve in functionality than most of the "freeware" bits you will find at random online sites, and has the added benefit of coming from a big name in online poker.
Sign up with Paddy Power Poker and enjoy the game without worrying about the bad guys.
