This malware shows your online poker hand to criminals

A new Trojan malware has been discovered silently taking screenshots to allow criminals to unfairly defeat the victim in online poker.

Security vendor ESET announced this week that several hundred PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker users have been infected with the Odlanor malware, which targets Windows environments.

"We have seen this Trojan masquerading as a number of benign installers for various general purpose programs, such as Daemon Tools or uTorrent. In other cases, the spyware is installed through various poker-related programs," ESET researcher Robert Lipovsky wrote on a blog post.

The malicious software scans the victim's computer to check if PokerStars or Full Tilt Poker is running. If so, it silently snaps screenshots of the user's poker hand and sends to the attacker, giving the scammer a considerable advantage in winning the game.

"[The screenshots] reveal not only the hands of the infected opponent but also the player ID. Both of the targeted poker sites allow searching for players by their player IDs, hence the attacker can easily connect to the tables on which they’re playing," said Lipovsky.

Lipovsky did not explicitly advise how the malware could be prevented or removed.