A Hacker Targeted High-Stakes Poker Players With Malware That Exposed Their Cards

In a fitting sign of the times, the hacker’s carefully laid plans were foiled by an AI agent.

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It was September 25, 2026, and Alex, a professional online poker player, was using his Claude AI agent to review some play statistics. (Alex only agreed to speak with WIRED under a pseudonym to avoid any risk of reprisals from threat actors.) After Alex’s SQL database crashed and needed to be reset, the Claude agent noticed something suspicious: A program called MeshAgent was operating in the background, where it seemed to be capable of capturing Alex’s screen and even controlling his entire machine.

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Thanks to the Claude agent’s report, Alex could see the program had been installed on April 24, and not by Alex himself. Alex says the agent identified 11 time-stamped events when the program had been capturing his screen based on graphic errors it caused during screen sharing instances. During all 11, Alex had been playing a session on ACR, also called Americas Cardroom, a major worldwide online poker operator.

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He checked his hand histories and quickly found the most troubling info yet: The same opponent, playing under the handle OxOO, was at his table for 10 of those 11…

Original source: https://www.wired.com/

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