The latest tweets from @DanDruffPoker. Dandruff is a common and often embarrassing condition. But, it can usually be treated with a dandruff shampoo. However, it is sometimes confused with other skin conditions, such as seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, eczema, and fungal infections.

December 4, 2011

Excessive dandruff or 'dander' as it's called on cats - can be the result of an unhealthy diet. Odds are you're feeding your cat a cheap grocery store cat food with corn as the main ingredient. Switch to a healthier food with MEAT as the main ingredient and with little to no grain.
Players with this leak understand poker in a very value-oriented way. When they bet, they have a stronger than normal range, which leaves their checking ranges weak and unprotected. You should adjust by putting a lot of pressure on those weak ranges with big and frequent probe bets.

Nobody is surprised when another scandal involving UB or Absolute Poker is announced. They cheated their own customers with superuser accounts that could see people's hole cards. They covered up the cheating after their own players discovered and proved it. They 'lost' hand histories pertaining to the cheating. And even after all that, they were found to have very weak data encryption. They finally topped it all off by not having any of the player funds actually on deposit, leaving account holders empty-handed after Black Friday.

When it was revealed that the personal information of most of UB's players found its way onto a shady website, the public response was muted, to say the least. Even though the situation was a pretty serious violation of privacy -- the biggest to ever hit online poker -- most people responded with a collective yawn.

'UB and AP screwed up again? Never saw that one coming!'

However, if you're one of the few like me with real interest in this matter, you'll probably enjoy this blog. And if you're mainly here because you're concerned about how much of your private info has fallen into the wrong hands, perhaps you'll understand the situation a bit better after reading everything here.

Before I begin, I would like to request that you do not contact me with requests for a copy of the leaked data. I made a promise to the person that provided it to me that I wouldn't distribute it. I keep all of my promises, and I can't make any exceptions, because that would be breaking my word. In addition, I don't want to further contribute to the invasion of privacy that has already occurred. Hopefully you will be able to rest a little bit easier after reading this analysis and you'll better understand what is and isn't out there.

So what happened?

Over 150 files appeared in a public area of a shady, affiliate-type website. These files were mostly Excel spreadsheets containing personal information of a lot (but not all) of UB's players. The files were mostly split up by country of origin. Each row of the spreadsheet contained an individual player's information. I will give a more detailed description of the Excel files later in this blog, but here's a quick summary of what was listed:

Screen names
First and last names
Full addresses (street, city, state, country, ZIP)
E-mail addresses
Phone numbers (for some players, not all)
IP addresses
VIP Level, and Blacklist/Chargeback status
Deposit methods used (for some players, not all)
Withdrawal methods used (for some players, not all)
Various numbers that were hard to decipher. These could be player balances, VIP point balances, or many other things used internally.
Date of signup (for some players, not all)
Date of birth
Other weird fields that cannot be explained/deciphered

It is not clear how or why these files ended up on that particular site. It was not an actively used site, nor was the data presented as if it were intentionally put there. In fact, the site itself had zero content. It appears that the public release of the data was accidental, and was probably uploaded by someone who stole the info from within UB (ex-employee?) and was packaging it to sell to spammers and/or online casinos.

It is also not clear how this was found. An anonymous screen name on the 2+2 forums posted the link to these files, but that post was removed (by the author) very quickly. It appears that relatively few people have seen these files, and those that have seem to be doing a good job of keeping it out of the general public's hands -- at least so far.

Here are two articles explaining it in more detail. Neither is 100% correct (I'll get to that shortly), but they do a pretty good job explaining the situation:

Kickass Poker Article
Subject:Poker Article

Note that the leaked information did NOT contain social security numbers, credit card numbers, or bank account numbers. The Excel spreadsheets also do not contain any passwords. While some of the other files are said to have some passwords, these do not appear to be real passwords -- perhaps temporary ones when accounts were started.

Can you explain the Excel spreadsheets? For windows 11.

The Excel spreadsheets are labeled by country. They contain just about every country you can think of, as well as lightly-populated geographic areas such as Antarctica. So were some of the world's top research scientists huddled in a shack on the South Pole, getting ripped off by Russ Hamilton on UB?

Not exactly.

The 'country' is only as good as the user providing it. Some users provided bogus countries as a joke, especially if they weren't interested in actually playing real money. For example, one of UB's Antarctica residents lived on 232 Gofuckyourself Street. I assume that's probably in the ghetto of Antarctica, but never having been there, I can't be certain.

Anyway, there's 3.2 million records total, spread over 100 Excel files. There's about 50 fields in each record, and I'll explain each one in detail below. Please note that these are not always consistent. That is, what shows up in column 'G' in some files appears in 'J' in others. In some of the larger files (such as the USA ones), the format actually changes within the file, as if a few files were merged together at some point. I am listing the format most commonly found, as I'm really just trying to give you an idea of what data is presented.

Furthermore, keep in mind that not all of the players listed are 'real'. That is, they were from UB's actual player database, but only the ones playing for real money were verified, which allowed Antarcticans on Gofuckyourself Street to join the site and show up in this file. However, this is more of the exception and not the rule, so most of the 3.2 million players listed are actual people with info that was correct at the time.

The fields in the Excel files are as follows (labeled A-BA):

A: First name
B: Last name
C: Country
D: E-mail
E: IP address
F: Presumably internal user ID #, most 7 digits but some have weird values like 0 or 299
G: Screen name, though some are blank or peculiarly listed as just 'Amazones'
H: Street address
I: Street address line 2
J: City
K: State/Province
L: ZIP
M: Another IP address
N: A timestamp from 11/24/2008 or 11/25/2008. Not sure what this means. Perhaps the time the record was imported into this particular database.
O and P: Blank
Q: Some say 'UltimateBet', some don't, but there is no clear pattern. It says this for some AP accounts, for example, even if those accounts were blacklisted before the UB/AP merger.
R: A number, 100000 for most people, higher for some, lower for a few. Might be play money balance.
S: A number, 0 for most, low (under 1000) for others, and higher (4, 5, or 6 figures) for a few. Part of me thinks this is the real money balance, but the cents are missing, so I'm not sure what to say.
T: Phone number. Some of the phone numbers listed have been verified.
U: Seems to be the same as the T field.
V: A number with two figures after the decimal point. 0 for many, small for some, larger (4-5 figures) for others. Also could be a player balance, but there seem to be too many whole numbers and values ending with .5.
W: Mostly zero, but in a few cases a small number. Not sure what this is.
X: Identical to column N
Y and Z: Blank
AA: Says 'UltimateBet.Com' for everyone
AB: Seems to be a repeat of the V field
AC: VIP level, though some are listed as 'Blacklist User' or 'Chargeback/Refund'. From

Dandruff Poker