Vivian Luk reports:
British Columbians’ personal information may have been compromised when the government’s online gambling website, PlayNow.com, crashed last week, according to the New Democratic Party.
PlayNow, the first government-sanctioned online casino in North America, was shut down only hours after it was launched last Thursday.
The B.C Lottery Corp. said unexpectedly high traffic caused the server to crash, so it had to be pulled down to be fixed. Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman, who is responsible for BCLC, also told CTV News on Friday that visitors’ information may have leaked.
“It does appear that some information — because of all the data hitting at once — might have been displayed on somebody’s computer, so we are dealing with that,” he said.
The NDP however, believes the website crashed because it was hacked, though it has no hard evidence to support that claim. “Experts have made assertions that hacking was a possibility,” said Shane Simpson, NDP critic for housing and social development. “But the most concerning thing is that the government and BCLC has not been definitive that there wasn’t some kind of activity that breached the security of the site.”
Read more in the Vancouver Sun.
Update: not a hack, but data were exposed.