A massive security breach at Betfair, the world´s largest betting company, has exposed millions of online poker players to the risk of having their personal banking details compromised by hackers, PokerNewsReport has reported.

Betfair in a press statement said that criminals had hacked into 11  servers in the UK and Malta, gaining access to 3.15 million account usernames with encrypted security questions, 2.9 million usernames with one or more address and 89,744 account usernames with bank account details.

The attacks occurred between March 28 and April 9 last year but were not noticed until a Maltese based server crashed on May 2. Betfair initially failed to inform its registered customers, claiming that "the data was unusable for fraudulent activity and it was able to recover the data intact.

PokerNewsReport said a report into the hacking scandal by London based security consultants "Information Risk Management" criticised Betfair for the inadequacy of its data security.  Betfair has implemented many of the recommendations made in Information Risk Management´s report, reportedly at a cost of £10 million, but has suffered a huge loss of confidence from players and investors alike – with their shares now trading at around £7.39.