DDOS DANGER FOR ONLINE GAMBLING SITES

22 February 2008

Resurgence of criminal activity warning


The spectre of DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) assaults again occupied the minds of IT and security officials at online gambling sites this week as reports surfaced of attacks on major online poker websites.

The online poker information portal Poker-king.com advised that many online poker and casino properties have suffered outages, naming Full Tilt Poker as probably the most visible with an inaccessible website for as long as 48 hours, probably incurring serious losses in business. As of 5 am EST Tuesday, the website is redirecting to www2.fulltiltpoker.com as a consequence of the attacks.

Online businesses are typically circumspect when attacked as they marshall internal and outside resources to combat the problems. Malicious DDOS attacks are frequently accompanied by extortionate and criminal demands for money to halt the offensive, and are therefore of interest to international enforcement agencies who collaborate extensively in tracking down the offenders.

A DDOS attack usually involves the criminals harnessing thousands of bots planted on previously infected PCs to bombard the target site with so much data that it cannot cope and is rendered unserviceable. Bot mercenary "armies" can number in the tens of thousands and mainly consist of computers owned by ordinary people who do not even know their equipment has been temporarily hijacked in this manner.

A whole anti-DDOS protective industry has grown up as a result of numerous past attacks, deploying sophisticated and powerful defence systems to shield clients and absorb the barrage of data.

The Shadow Server.org organisation reported that a wave of attacks on Internet gambling sites commenced on February 10th and continued through to February 18th. Among the targets were Full Tilt Poker, Party Casino, Titan Poker, Virgin Games, CD Poker and Europa Casino. In addition, a number of Russian online gambling sites were targeted, including Pokerlistings.ru.

The extent of the outages for each site varied depending on the ferocity of the attacks and if they had any anti-DDoS attack measures in place.

Full Tilt Poker is clearly still having issues while a number of the Russian web properties are still down. There have been reports that Full Tilt's poker room has crashed numerous times over the past few days, including an embarrassing outage during the final table of the FTOPS main event.

The motive behind the attacks is still unknown. Was there an extortion attempt made? Will there be an extortion attempt made? Or is there some other reason behind the attacks?

Online Casino News courtesy of InfoPowa