Apparently some hacker has created a trojan that will reveal your hole cards to him on Party, and if you are infected he will sit at your table and take your money. His name was 'playerlogin' and it may be 'tealninja' now. He likes to challenge people to heads up matches, with disastrous results for those who accept.

Sadly it's predictable that something like this would eventually happen and I expect it to become more common. It just goes to show you should never connect to the internet without a firewall and you should always have the latest patches installed.

Surely if a hacker had gained remote access to your computer (i.e. could use your mouse) it would be pretty easy for him to use a keystroke logger to get your poker passwords or even to empty your account remotely, without going to through the pointless effort of "playing" your account money against himself on a 6-handed table, so i'd certainly treat that with a pinch of salt...

The stories about being hacked and thus your hole cards being known seem more plausible, though. I'm sure this will probably have happened at some point, but I guess you just have to be sure to keep your computer secure as far as possible and not leave your entire BR sitting in your party account. Personally, I keep no more than $1k in any of my accounts at any one time (though in total I usually have $5-7k in my various crypto accounts, and previously split 2k between party and empire until i quit empire) and certainly wouldn't leave money sitting in neteller for any extended period...

The most ridiculous story is the guy who suspected that the purp could see his hole cards, and so to "prove" it to himself, played the guy heads up and lost 10 buyins. If that really is true he's so stupid he deserved to get scammed.....

I am quietly sceptical about some of this story, though I don't doubt that it's possible to be hacked by a programme that allows what's on your monitor to be seen remotely (in fact, I know you can be).

DO I have service pack2 automatically? How do I know if I have it?

The XP firewall is pretty weedy. If you haven't got an alternative product it might be wise to look into it. I use Zonealarm (I think you can get a free version, though I paid for the full version plus virus checker), and haven't had any security problems whilst using it.

Windows is a pretty swiss-cheesey product, if you've got $1000's online in your poker accounts I think it's a good investment to pick up the best quality firewall, virus and anti-spyware software you can reasonably get hold of...

Agreed that XP is very swiss cheesy. Ice-To see if you have sp2, right click on My Computer on your desktop, goto Properties. On the General tab it will tell you what OS and sp you have.