How a Casino Account Gets Hijacked, and the Two Settings That Stop It

· 2 min read
How a Casino Account Gets Hijacked, and the Two Settings That Stop It

A friend called me last spring because her casino balance had gone from £140 to nothing overnight, and the withdrawal had been sent to a wallet she had never heard of. Nobody had hacked anything. Her password was the same one she used for a shopping site that had leaked three years earlier, and the login came from a browser she did not own. Untangling it took a fortnight. Preventing it would have taken four minutes.

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Why reuse is the whole problem

Attackers do not guess passwords one by one. They take lists of email and password pairs from old breaches and try them automatically on hundreds of sites, casinos included. If your casino password appears anywhere else, you are on that list. A unique password, generated by a password manager and never typed from memory, removes you from it. Length matters more than symbols: a passphrase of four unrelated words beats a short string with an exclamation mark.

The second lock

Two-factor authentication means a login needs something you have as well as something you know. Casinos usually offer a code by text or a code from an authenticator app. Choose the app. Text codes can be hijacked by someone persuading your mobile network to move your number, and that attack is far more common than it ought to be. Ninewin Casino puts the setting under security in the account menu; once enabled, a stolen password on its own is useless.

Write down the recovery codes and keep them away from the phone. The number of people locked out of their own accounts after replacing a handset is a quiet embarrassment of the whole system.

The door nobody checks

Your email account can reset every other password you own. Protect it with its own unique passphrase and its own two-factor before you touch anything else. Then be suspicious of any message about your casino account that includes a link: the real operator will never ask for a password by email, and the safest response to any such message is to open the site by typing the address and look for the notice there.

Afterwards

My friend got the balance back, eventually, because the operator's logs showed the login came from an unfamiliar device and country. Not everyone is that fortunate. Gambling accounts are for adults only, and so is the responsibility for the password on them.