Officials at DraftKings have confirmed that a number of player accounts were recently accessed by hackers who withdrew more than $300,000 from the compromised accounts. Though company officials are warning all DraftKings account holders to strengthen their passwords, they also say that the incident was limited in scope and did not involve a breach of company servers.
While it’s not clear how many accounts were accessed by the hackers, DraftKings confirms that about $300,000 was stolen (though it seems that the player accounts were made whole by the company). The company also reports that the players’ log-in information was stolen by a third-party site, likely a bet-tracking app of some kind.
In a statement reported on by ESPN.com, DraftKings co-founder Paul Liberman commented on the situation saying, “DraftKings is aware that some customers are experiencing irregular activity with their accounts. We currently believe that the login information of these customers was compromised on other websites and then used to access their DraftKings accounts where they used the same login information. We have seen no evidence that DraftKings’ systems were breached to obtain this information. We have identified less than $300,000 of customer funds that were affected, and we intend to make whole any customer that was impacted.
“We strongly encourage customers to use unique passwords for DraftKings and all other sites, and we strongly recommend that customers do not share their passwords with anyone, including third party sites for the purposes of tracking betting information on DraftKings and other betting apps,” he added.
As of this writing, the hack seems to be limited to DraftKings players and has not spread to other operators.