DDoS threats and attacks!

[BETAT]

Hi everyone,

This thread is posted to both CM's of operators out there as well as the community to cover some things that have been happening on Slotty Vegas and BETAT recently.

As of last week, we have received the following email:

From: DD4BC Team
Sent: 05 April 2015 14:30
To: <many betat and slotty emails>
Subject: DDOS ATTACK!

Hello,


To introduce ourselves first:

You do not have permission to view link Log in or register now.

Old / Expired Link

You do not have permission to view link Log in or register now.

Or just google “DD4BC” and you will find more info.

Recently, we were DDoS-ing Neteller. You probably know it already.



So, it’s your turn!


slottyvegas.com and betatcasino.com is going under attack unless you pay 10 Bitcoin.

Pay to 1NbhLM43duL2J2tBX2qQWBojEm5fNSoMEp


Please note that it will not be easy to mitigate our attack, because our current UDP flood power is 400-500 Gbps, so don't even bother.

Right now we are running small demonstrative attack on your server.
Don't worry, it will stop in 1 hour. It's just to prove that we are serious.

We are aware that it's weekend and you might now have 10 BTC at the moment, so we are giving you time until Monday to get it and pay us.

btw. BTC can be easily purchased through Webmoney (WMZ to WMX).




IMPORTANT: You don’t even have to reply. Just pay 10 BTC to 1NbhLM43duL2J2tBX2qQWBojEm5fNSoMEp – we will know it’s you and you will never hear from us again.
We say it because for big companies it's usually the problem as they don't want that there is proof that they cooperated. If you need to contact us, feel free to use some free email service.

But if you ignore us, and don't pay until Monday, price to stop will go to
20 BTC and will keep going up for every hour of attack.


ONE MORE TIME: It’s a one-time payment. Pay and you will not hear from us ever again!


Thank you.

I'll follow up with our commentary in the next post.

 

[Valhalla]

For the layman, what is a DDOS attack and how does it affect the casinos?

 

[BETAT]

What you can Expect

The threats originated for the Easter Holidays and indeed, come Monday we were hit with 45 Gbps of DDoS bandwidth.

This attack was vicious, massive and wide spread and hit our entire range of sub-nets, even our CDN has been compromised (Content Delivery Network) as well as our AWS (Amazon's Cloud Service).

To say that 45Gbps (45 Gigabits per second) of bandwidth is a lot is a gross understatement. These hackers have massive capacity and are highly organised. Luckily, we are well equipped to handle these kinds of attacked and while nothing of this magnitude has been recorded on both our front, nor on the service providers experience, we are highly confident that by end of the week we will have the situation under full control.

That said, next 5-7 days will be rough and our customers may experience times of inconsistent performance. We are preparing an email to our customer base on this as i write this, to inform them of our intent.

Message to other operators out there: the DD4B team seems to have been doing this since late 2014 and started with illegal bit coin exchanges and illegal gaming businesses. They have now moved onto legitimate businesses. I strongly suggest that you speak to your individual CTO's and re-visit your DDoS mitigation services and the resiliency of your network. The hacking group claims that they have 400-500 Gbps sustained DDosS capacity.

If proven true, there is very little any system setup can do to thwart that size of an sustained attack, baring a complete network segregation into multiple DNS points which is highly expensive and difficult to maintain. If you have similar recent experiences, kindly PM me.

Now, as for the customers:

This is not a hack. This means that your information is not exposed in any way for two very important reasons:

1. Nature of a DDoS attack (i'll explain what ddos is in the next post) and
2. Our systems are built in a way that segregate front end environments from any back end applications and databases. The data is never open to the public in any way.

The most that can ever happen when playing on our sites, is that in case of an attack and/or a hack, website pages are exposed. The data structure is built on an internal network and bets communicate over an encrypted "backbone" channel - effectively meaning that whenever there is a web -level attack, the channel is shut down stopping all play and all communication. This is the reason you experience a termination of service rather than a degradation. It carries a greater impact on revenue stream, but the service security is maintained.

Final DDoS explanation to follow.

 

[Valhalla]

Final DDoS explanation to follow.

Waiting for this because I'm baffled.

 

[PaaskeDenmark]

For the layman, what is a DDOS attack and how does it affect the casinos?

Not trying to take anything from BetAt here but just quick explanation:

In computing, a denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. A DoS attack generally consists of efforts to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.

So basically they send massive attack which will bring the host(website) in loss of business because of downtime. The same which happened for Neteller.

 

[BETAT]

DDoS - What is it, and how does it effect you?

DDos or DoS stands for

"Denial of Service", or "Distributed Denial of Service".

In the simplest of terms - A DDoS attack uses many computers distributed across the Internet in an attempt to consume available resources on the target.

How does it influence the service?

Imagine logging onto a site. That site hosts pages and communicates with other elements. That communication eats up bandwidth that we pay for to our service providers. Very similarly how you, the user, eat up bandwidth by streaming YouTube and browsing the net with your ISP (the ones that have bandwidth limitations eat it up, the ones that dont never care ).

ALL sites, not just gaming sites - but all sites on the whole of internet, CM included, and every other site online, pays for their servers and pays for the bandwidth in accordance to their demands. Based on the traffic a site has, a site would need more, or less bandwidth accordingly. This is considered part of our e-commerce business cost.

Now, to expalin the impact of a DDoS, first we need to explain a difference between a bit, and a byte. In computer terms, one byte consists of 8 bits. Similarly to how one unit of currency consists of one hundred cents.

Bandwidth is measured in megaBITS or gigaBITS; while file size on your computer is measured in megaBYTES, or gigaBYTES. so 1 BYTE = 8 BITS; One MegaByte = 8 MegaBits.

as a result 1 MegaByte (1MB - capital B) = 8 MegaBits (8Mb - small b)

For example: if CasinoMesiter homepage is 1MB (Megabyte) in "weight" (meaning all pics and pages and texts have a size of one megabyte); and if CM servers have a bandwidth float of 8Mbps (Megabits per second)

then that would mean that CM can handle ONE user loading the homepage per second. Now, pages are rarely that large and sites are able to sustain many hundreds of users calling their pages per second, or as we call it "concurrent users" (users logged on at the same time).

So each one of you, users, takes a small part of our "same-time" capacity. When we reach larger volumes of traffic, our revenue increases, so we buy more bandwidth. I hope that is clear so far.

What DDoS attack does, is create bots (robots) - in fact, it creates many thousands and millions of bots and sends immeasurable amounts of fake traffic to websites, creating massive resource usage. it looks like we have thousands of users, but we do not, we have little "spiders" crawling up and down our pages creating havoc and eating up resource. These attacks create so many calls and simultaneous requests, that the servers and the bandwidth simply give out under the weight.

When you hear about "Anonymous" bringing the department of justice site offline - that's basically what happens. The sites are unable to handle the load being pushed onto them.

There is no other goal with a DDoS attack but to bring a site offline and make a business unable to operate. There are no other benefits than to blackmail the business to "pay up, or else"

There are ways to protect against this, they are both highly expensive and complex - and for most attacks, you, the end user, never feel it had occurred. This particular attack is incredibly powerful, which is the reason i am writing this public post and calling on any operator who has experienced a similar threat to reach out to me.

This by no means implies that the service remains unprotected. This simply means that we have to spend a pretty large sum of monies to increase our resiliency barriers. I'm highly surprised with recent events, and so are my service providers who have admitted these attacks have been the "internal talk of town" in the last 6 months and belong to a highly organised group stemming from Eastern Europe. This information however, remains unconfirmed.

So far the situation has been mitigated. I'll keep you posed on further developments.

Best,

Igor

 

[hedgehok]

This is immensely worrying and I can not do more then wish you all the best with your efforts to avert this vicious crime.
You are my favourite casino!

 

[BETAT]

Nothing to worry about!

Not to worry. I trust my team, top to bottom, and they are aces. Every last one of them. This attack is surprisingly large, although we've had many in the past you guys never felt, but just the same - not impossible to mitigate, just costly (so less bonuses this month! )

Joking aside, we're on it 24/7 and while we may have a hit an miss going forward a plan of action is in place and many, many people are involved in resolving this issues both promptly and efficiently.

Igor

 

[ugaboga]

So they want about 2.5k? Seems like a rather low ransom figure. How often do corporates actually pay them out?

I might have missed it but where are the origins of these attacks? IMO, they're very hard to permanently stop. Banks who spend hundreds of millions on network security are often unable to stop them from happening.

Good luck though - this is the problem with anonymous payment methods like bitcoin, it's used by hackers for ransom purposes.

 

[Jory]

I was unable to connect to BETAT or slottyvegas on the first attempt, but a few refreshes and the site loaded and appears to perform adequately once connected.

I think sending out an email to all customers is a good idea. I'm sure many won't fully understand , but they will appreciate the honesty and save them the bother of trying to fix the problem themselves by deleting their cookies...

Hopefully you get it under control soon. Even neteller with all their millions struggled to find a quick soultion. I just hope these kind of attacks don't become more frequent and people are wise enough to never pay them off.

 

[BETAT]

There's no way we're paying. When did you ever hear of a ransom ACTUALLY being requested once?

Nah, the 2.5K is the bait. the service we need to buy and set up is literally 20 times the amount requested, annually, and when i tell you i would gladly pay twice that rather than give a penny for this crock of horse**** being peddled about, believe i mean it.

 

[thebigs]

There's no way we're paying. When did you ever hear of a ransom ACTUALLY being requested once?

Nah, the 2.5K is the bait. the service we need to buy and set up is literally 20 times the amount requested, annually, and when i tell you i would gladly pay twice that rather than give a penny for this crock of horse**** being peddled about, believe i mean it.

Ok Mr Betat if you do not pay my ransom of 17 euro and 22 cents i will come over to your offices and pass wind so all your staff will leave the office for a week until it was safe.
Buying gas masks for your staff would work out too expensive.

 

[Jory]

There's no way we're paying. When did you ever hear of a ransom ACTUALLY being requested once?

I'm just thinking back to Christmas when Kim Dotcom paid off Lizard Squad who had brought the Xbox and Playstaion servers offline. It gave a lot of publicity to these kind of attacks and they have become a lot more frequent since.

 

[Mousey]

What DDoS attack does, is create bots (robots) - in fact, it creates many thousands and millions of bots and sends immeasurable amounts of fake traffic to websites, creating massive resource usage. it looks like we have thousands of users, but we do not, we have little "spiders" crawling up and down our pages creating havoc and eating up resource. These attacks create so many calls and simultaneous requests, that the servers and the bandwidth simply give out under the weight.

Another good reason to keep our home computers firewalled and clean of all malware as botnets often include thousands/millions of infected home computers.

I hope the @ssholes can be stopped and eventually ferreted out. Good luck to you Betat!

 

[Chipkin9]

There's no way we're paying.

That's the right attitude to take.

If you pay these scumbags off, it only encourages them to do it again at another Casino, or whatever other online business tickles their fancy.

Nice to see you taking a stand against these criminals

 

[pmutts]

Cyber Crime the largest threat to life as we know it IMO

Thank you for sharing this information with us BETAT. This is one example of countless crimes carried out daily and it is nearly impossible to find and catch the perpetrators. So they bring down an online gaming operator for a few hours or a few days. Who in the hell will care except for the owners and the players.

For a comprehensive understanding of what a DDOS Attack is and how it is done please see the following link:

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Because the potential financial gain is so great and the risk of being caught--let alone prosecuted is minuscule. Additionally, the assholes (to put it nicely) get off on what they are doing in more than just a monetary way.

In order to keep them from unwittingly using YOUR computer as one of the thousands used in their attack we MUST be vigilant. Keep all security updates current in Windows or your operating system. Keep ALL the software programs updated at all times. Be especially careful about running JAVA because it is never truly secure. Keep a first rate Anti-Virus program with the most current definitions. Never EVER open a file from an unknown source. Finally, never used pirated software. The risk simply is not worth it.

DDOS Attacks are relative "child's play" in the world of Cyber Crime. Cyber Crime is a direct treat to all of us. A DDOS Attack cannot be carried out unless the perps have enough machines under their control in which to do so. This is one we can all prevent.

 

[ugaboga]

I'm just thinking back to Christmas when Kim Dotcom paid off Lizard Squad who had brought the Xbox and Playstaion servers offline. It gave a lot of publicity to these kind of attacks and they have become a lot more frequent since.

Kim Dotcom gave them vouchers to his website. Maybe BETAT could give them free $10 ND chips

 

[chayton]

BetAt isn't the first to be hit - this has happened to other casinos online. Some actually did pay because it was cheaper to pay than to lose income. But I agree with Igor, I certainly wouldn't pay them. I don't know anything about bitcoin, if they're asking to be 'paid' in that currency must mean that it's untraceable right? If that's the case I'm surprised the DOJ or the Feds aren't all over it like the Liberty Reserve thing from last year. Untraceable money screams of washing the proceeds of crime. To me, at least.

 

[KasinoKing]

I always knew BitCoin was a VERY bad idea. Now you have proof, if it were ever needed.
Totally anonymity = perfect for criminals...

KK

 

[conker]

Hi Igor, thanks for sharing your experiences, I admire your resilliance to not roll over and payout the ransom whatever the cost.

Can I ask where you report something like this? I am assuming this is the kind of thing that Interpol have to get involved with. No doubt the perpetrators are based in some far off land where laws are hazy at best, so it requires a bit of a collaborative effort to bring the criminals to justice.

I believe CM was hit by a DDOS attack a few years ago. Not a nice thing to go through

 

[Simmo!]

I always knew BitCoin was a VERY bad idea. Now you have proof, if it were ever needed.
Totally anonymity = perfect for criminals...

KK

Yeah totally agree. You don't need anonymity unless you've something to hide. In most cases online, people are just trying to hide the fact they are twats but it is indeed necessary for criminals.

 

[AnnaTS]

We use to get DDO attacks in some of the mmorpg games i play and some onine shops use to get them which would end in the service not being available or it was very slow it's just a nuisance but i didn't know people asked for ransoms i was suprised when i read that.

I read a story online about a year ago people where using bitcoin to buy illegal substances from a website i wonder what else would pop up if you typed bitcoin illegal transactions in google by sounds of maybe many results would come up.

I remember something posting this on a mmorpg forum i assuming the link is ok as it's still there if not you can remove it, the lights may look pretty but i don't think the people or person who is on the end of it may think so Outdated URL (Invalid)

Anna

 

[Patriot66]

Got the email from BETAT before I read this thread. Very encouraging to see them handling this situation with the utmost professionalism.

Good luck

 

[Jakestar]

The attackers have a 100 BTC bounty on their head for their identity :O

 

[incrediblestuff]

Maybe the hackers also have shares in the Bitcoin and Anti DDOS markets..
Good to see you handling it the way you are Igor!
Hope they catch those crooks.

 

[Matti]

Dear Igor,

Thank you for sharing this ordeal with the CM community, and with your fellow colleagues in the gambling industry, both operators and affiliates. Cyber crime is something we all have to fight together. I realise that you are the one who is taking the hit right now but the knowledge you share while fighting this, will hopefully assist in finding these a**holes.

 

[Birdy84]

Thanks for the email about this, the most important thing is that customers information is secure. As for if there are some issues with the site stability due to the ddos attacks you have let everyone know about the problem and im sure people appreciate your efforts to get through this problem, very unlucky they targeted betat but good for you for not giving in to these crooks. I hope betats wallet doesnt suffer to much from this as you are my favourtie casino to play with and i would hate to not get all the lovely promos anymore Wish you guys loads of luck with getting it sorted.

 

[Fjellsame]

The attackers have a 100 BTC bounty on their head for their identity :O

Raised to 110 BTC ($32,000 USD)bounty for the capture of DD4BC :sniper:

 

[Kiwiguy]

Not to worry. I trust my team, top to bottom, and they are aces. Every last one of them. This attack is surprisingly large, although we've had many in the past you guys never felt, but just the same - not impossible to mitigate, just costly (so less bonuses this month! )

Joking aside, we're on it 24/7 and while we may have a hit an miss going forward a plan of action is in place and many, many people are involved in resolving this issues both promptly and efficiently.

Igor

Greetings Igor ,

and sorry to hear about what's going on I can't believe what scum will try these days and 2.5k are they serious are the authorities investigating the matter ? DDos extortion j.h.c I've heard it all *shakes head*.

 

[Deeplay]

This kind of thing really pisses me off! I remember the CM dos attack a few years back. Senseless! And the casino is right in this case NOT to pay. I remember a bunch of servers we ran had a very nasty injection of code with a sustained attack back in 2009. Took us 4 days to dig all the payloads out and repel the attack. Ended up with having to rebuild a whole new cluster of servers. Cost time and money! But shows it is not impossible. They will keep trying to locate weak access points but in the end every attack can be overcome and they will I hope move on when they find it will bring them zero gain.

These are usually script kiddies who imagine themselves as some kind of high tech pirates. When caught they end up pissing there pants having to face justice. The casino will stand firm and overcome this I am absolutely sure!

 

[dunover]

Well, I did say this a while back, Shitcoin is the means of exchange now for such delightful scum as blackmailers, paedophiles and sellers on the 'dark web' which can mean anything from designer drugs to weapons.

As with any warren of non-followable tunnels, the rats will soon pour in and infest them.

What we need is a huge DDOS attack on Shitcoin themselves...

 

[Deeplay]

Well, I did say this a while back, Shitcoin is the means of exchange now for such delightful scum as blackmailers, paedophiles and sellers on the 'dark web' which can mean anything from designer drugs to weapons.

As with any warren of non-followable tunnels, the rats will soon pour in and infest them.

What we need is a huge DDOS attack on Shitcoin themselves...

The basis of Bitcoin is sound but is open to abuse as is everything. When the feds took the down TSR all that happened was the rats migrated to other nests and reformed. But should it be stopped ? Im not sure as it leads to all kinds of freedom issues. But an attack like this they are having sure fight back pay not 1 cent and they will move on. Im not sure it is a good thing to keep posting on this for the sake of Betat. Because these script kiddies feed of infamy and this could only provoke them more. When we had issues we made a notice to clients 1. so they knew what was happening. Then went dark until the issue was fixed and never spoke on the horror again. Less interaction with the hackers the better. Solve the issue close ranks go silent and make sure all is secure. These kinds of kiddies love drama and interaction. Much of it is ego backed up with the possibility of earning some $$$.

 

[onkel]

The basis of Bitcoin is sound but is open to abuse as is everything. When the feds took the down TSR all that happened was the rats migrated to other nests and reformed. But should it be stopped ? Im not sure as it leads to all kinds of freedom issues. But an attack like this they are having sure fight back pay not 1 cent and they will move on. Im not sure it is a good thing to keep posting on this for the sake of Betat. Because these script kiddies feed of infamy and this could only provoke them more. When we had issues we made a notice to clients 1. so they knew what was happening. Then went dark until the issue was fixed and never spoke on the horror again. Less interaction with the hackers the better. Solve the issue close ranks go silent and make sure all is secure. These kinds of kiddies love drama and interaction. Much of it is ego backed up with the possibility of earning some $$$.

The term script kiddies implies that they're running scripts that "real hackers" made. I don't think you manage to get 400gbps at your disposal without knowing what you're doing, and def not by running scripts you found on the internet.

 

[dunover]

There are ways to defend against it. The sites affected can use dynamic generated url's specific to the customers' MAC addresses so only people can log-on that are previous customers, all other traffic is directed to a 'stooge server' for the basic url. The disadvantage is that new customers using the basic address url of the site as listed in Google etc. couldn't sign-up while the site was under attack. Plus it's hellishly expensive. Then the attackers may move to bombard through affiliate sites and search engines themselves. You also get your main listing url in the SE's un-functional for a time.

Then there's the various url's in the target site. What they do is simply list all the entry urls i.e. xxx.bet-at.eu/games or /promotions or /slots and attack all these url's simultaneously with blocks of drone PC's they've infected in their botnet.

The good thing is that once a site doesn't pay (which NONE should) the botnet is wasting it's power and they will move on as said previously.

 

[BETAT]

Thank you

Everyone, thank you for the support.

We have been approached by the group who seem to have found this thread. They have made this apparent in their email content. In their email they stated they will wait until we feel we are "safe" before they hit again, thanked us for free publicity and stated that as a result of said publicity, other "legitimate businesses" have approached them for services. How much truth there is to that statement, i do not know; but what seems to be the case at this moment is that our decision to not hide this event from our players, and to publicly stand in front of all our challenges, as we always have, has deflated their resolve to sustain the damage to our business - at least for the time being.

We are fully focused on continuing to upgrade our defenses and whether it will be enough to thwart future attacks from this highly skilled group of individuals, only time will tell. However i remain decisive that this is the only way forward and succumbing to their demands was never, and will never, be an option. This resolve remains as strong as ever.

I would appreciate it if, as Deeplay wisely suggested, we did not bring further attention to this thread by commenting and if one of the mods could close it when they get a chance to.

Email to the customer base to follow.

Until next time, while i remain hopeful there will not be one on this topic,

Kind regards,

Igor

 

[Jono777]

*Pointless Post* Sorry

 

[syntynyt]

I always knew BitCoin was a VERY bad idea. Now you have proof, if it were ever needed.
Totally anonymity = perfect for criminals...

KK

not really. before bitcoin they used ukash/payunsafecard - hacked a service that allowed them and they had the codes before the service. then they used it to buy stuff at different services, stuff that landed at a 'drop place'(which carry different meanings) or reselled the codes for lower prices.
bitcoin is NOT total anonymity. they use many b-wallets and services specially created to 'wash' them for a little fee before hitting their personal wallet. many were caught because they thought this is total anonymous but actually is in the hands of US agencies. bitcoin is just the easiest way for them.

its fluctuation is not random at all. back in the day when Silkroad was up and running suddenly a major quantity of cocaine and other drugs showed up for sale which was a coincidence that US just made 1 month before one of the biggest confiscation at mexican border. many say that US officials were getting rid of it through that site and is actually when price hit a maximum of $300, everyone buying bitcoins for cheap drugs, even real dealers only to resell them in profit. a while after was $800 for each bitcoin so whoever were behind these drugs is now a millionaire. many claim that Silkroad was not running by that guy that was arrested for it but by an US agency that was fishing major dealers of all kinds only to arrest them and resell the goods themselves. a conspiracy theory of course, but many big ring arrests were because of bitcoin usage, the same goods reappearing shortly after from other accounts that had the same recipe and taste that only those already imprisoned made it, customers said in the forums.
so you all know, hackers themselves spit of the cards and bank system and prefer to walk with loads of cash because of banking vulnerability that is exploited every day.

i'm sure BETAT are handling this but there is a slim way to stop them in long term once for all time. once the victim get rid of them they are getting better and so should do the victim. if BETAT pay there will be a period of silence and all good and threats will come back...is always happening.
i'm actually surprised that PayPal did not closed its doors giving the amount of frauds(hundreds) happening there every day that are not being spoken in media to keep the credibility in their service. there is no way to catch the big fishes and since the very little VPN mistake made by the one that leaked Sony movies, now they are protecting even better. i like to follow the subject right in its heart on Tor reading their posts but to take part in such crimes special access is requied and a test that must conclude with at least 5 years of experiences and successful hits. is like a job but in misdoings, some always suffering in a way or another. cyber police is now a little behind high calibre hackers but this situation can change in matter of minutes in police favor. every week one is getting caught, medium types. many are sleeping tough at night because being an assassin or this type of hacker carry the same risk with decades of prison time in the US. you are always behind programs that could be hacked as well.

 

[dunover]

Everyone, thank you for the support.

We have been approached by the group who seem to have found this thread. They have made this apparent in their email content. In their email they stated they will wait until we feel we are "safe" before they hit again, thanked us for free publicity and stated that as a result of said publicity, other "legitimate businesses" have approached them for services. How much truth there is to that statement, i do not know; but what seems to be the case at this moment is that our decision to not hide this event from our players, and to publicly stand in front of all our challenges, as we always have, has deflated their resolve to sustain the damage to our business - at least for the time being.

We are fully focused on continuing to upgrade our defenses and whether it will be enough to thwart future attacks from this highly skilled group of individuals, only time will tell. However i remain decisive that this is the only way forward and succumbing to their demands was never, and will never, be an option. This resolve remains as strong as ever.

I would appreciate it if, as Deeplay wisely suggested, we did not bring further attention to this thread by commenting and if one of the mods could close it when they get a chance to.

Email to the customer base to follow.

Until next time, while i remain hopeful there will not be one on this topic,

Kind regards,

Igor

They are full of false bravado, piss and wind. They tried it, you didn't pay and fought them off! Their only 'publicity' is to look embarrassed and humiliated. Their lifeblood is money - without that they fade away and die like starving rats. As for closing the thread, maybe, but it looks a bit funny as you started it! If you are now regretting starting it for fear of what these vermin think or threaten then maybe ask it to be deleted altogether - although you can't 'unring' a bell.

 

[syntynyt]

BETAT posted while i was working with my bloody engRish to make my post sound in english. so i just saw that last post, sorry for continuing. i'm there to follow ISIS subject and other crappy important events of this world that mainstream media wash them for the public and i don't like it. and i end by reading bit of each major sites.
the only deal is NO DEAL and congrats for the guts of taking this to the public. if they read this thread they know they have other ways to make dirty money and to keep threatening one service is a waste of time and resources. now i'm stopping posting and good luck.

 

[Simmo!]

I can't see that closing this thread will really achieve anything. It won't make these criminals any more or less active and it's good that these sorts of crimes and how they are perpetrated receive public awareness in my opinion.

It's just a shame that people with obvious technical skills chose to become criminals, steal from others and generally make life worse for everyone when they could quite clearly use their skills to achieve something positive, add something to the world and possibly even be recognised for it.

 

[spoton]

There is no point feeding these peoples egos by saying their are technical masterminds or anything like that. They are nothing but low level scum. Sure they might have some computer skills, but they might aswell have bought the exploit/software needed to infect 50k-100k computers or so from others or simply gotten lucky. In the same way affiliate spammers don't need more than probably 0.01% to click on their links to make a bit of money, these guys don't need more than the same percentage clicking on "hotgirl.exe" to spread their malware.

The real technical skilled people get good jobs, they don't go around blackmailing reputable businesses for a couple of thousands.

 

[refre]

Very sorry about all of this.

Crossing my fingers you'll be able to expose and shut them down.

BetAt.com has been down for 3 days now - at least for me.


Freddy

 

[bonustreak]

Igor please get in touch with me via mail thanks!

 

[Jasminebed]

Looks like our friends at Redbet are under attack as well. They have instituted a captcha style verification to even access their website, but the dirty buggers have managed to damage their deposits and email.

I do hope casino managements are reporting these cyber crimes to Interpol and whatever local police forces might have jurisdiction.

I appreciate the honesty from Redbet's support. As much as I was looking forward to playing today, I will hang onto that deposit until they have things up and running.

It's not much, but the best way I can offer my support to the casino to not give in to blackmail.

The more often the criminals try it on, the more likely they are to be caught.

 

[Jasminebed]

I was able to deposit just now. I don't know how long the problem lasted for Redbet, and I hope gameplay goes well.

Having to enter a verification to access website is only a very minor bother, and I imagine does a great deal to thwart bots.

 

[The Dude]

Just to add - most people in the industry know who is behind these attacks. The best way to deal with - as I mentioned earlier - is to report these attacks to the appropriate criminal investigation department. Our servers are in London - so contacting the Metropolitan Cybercrime unit is a no brainer. Some of you may remember that these guys (the Metropolitan Police) have made arrests in the past against these crooks (two polish guys who are now in prison dropping the soap). I'd be only more than happy to assist in putting a few more douchebags in jail.

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[maxd]

Hearing reports of other sites under attack as I type this, same MO.

FWIW I don't think dropping a cone of silence on this is the way to go. The more people know about this the more likely that the necessary pressure will be brought to bear on the scumbags responsible for this kind of vandalism. They've already shown that they are emboldened by success and we've seen that they are cowed by the force of the law (when it gets around to doing its business). More of the latter has got to be a good thing.

 

[vinylweatherman]

Hearing reports of other sites under attack as I type this, same MO.

FWIW I don't this dropping a cone of silence on this is the way to go. The more people know about this the more likely that the necessary pressure will be brought to bear on the scumbags responsible for this kind of vandalism. They've already shown that they are emboldened by success and we've seen that they are cowed by the force of the law (when it gets around to doing its business). More of the latter has got to be a good thing.

It also means that players become aware that this is an ongoing problem, and one to be considered when it appears that xxxx casino has suddenly "vanished with their money" due to the site being unavailable for a number of days without explanation.

Given that other sites are now under attack, it's possible that players will see several of their favourites go offline without explanation for a while over the coming weeks, but it shouldn't be taken as a sign that they have run off with the cash.

 

[maxd]

Quite so and well said.

 

[AffGency]

the only thing I do not understand it why they asking for 10 BTC ?

it does not add up to the damage they doing or can do

there is something weird on the story