Casinos.co.uk: Casino News Archive
Wednesday 7th July 2004
Concerns over organised crime attacks on iGaming sites
Alongside the positive stories announcing the continued growth in the online gambling industry, growth in another area is starting to provide a new and tricky problem for online operators. Organised crime aimed at online gambling companies is a new issue facing the industry. Harkening back to the old practice of protection rackets, reports have been made of online hackers based in eastern Europe who can take control of a gambling website and demand payment in order to relinquish that control so that the site can continue to function as normal.
Companies based in both Costa Rica and Britain have revealed that they have been the victims of such extortion attempts. Spokesperson for eHorse, Kevin Martin revealed that his company was the victim of such a crime back in October of last year. The company noticed that visitors to the site had reduced to practically zero, which then became apparent was the result of vandals taking the site offline. Martin has explained, 'We just couldn't figure out why our system wasn't working...We get an e-mail, an extortion e-mail, saying, `We've got control of all your system. If you want to get your system back, pay us $30,000, and we'll stop doing it, and we'll protect your system from anybody else.'
The system these vandals use to attack sites, has been coined as using “zombie” computers. This entails using mostly home based machines with access to broadband that contain virus programmes. A lot of the machines which have been zombiefied are done so without the people using them knowing. Commands can be sent from anywhere around the world which instructs these machines to bombard any targeted site with useless data. This practice, called a “denial of service” attack, floods the site with data when around 50,000 zombie machines have been instructed to send the data at the same time, which means that at that time nobody’s data can get thorugh, effectively disabling the site.
Some companies have paid up to have service resumed on their sites, but as the estimated annual revenue for the industry as a whole has risen to US$15billion, so too has the quantity demanded by the organised crime groups holding sites hostage risen- the going rate now being between US$60,000- $100,000. This high cost for a functioning site to be restored, as well as the fact that there is nothing stopping the criminals targeting the same site once they know they will pay up, has now meant that companies are less inclined to pay this ransom money.
For companies based in Costa Rica however, addressing this new crime issue is a difficult task, as the country has few resources to utilise in the pursuit of any criminal activity. Also, although many of the operators are owned by Americans, the continued hazy legal status of online gambling in the US means that any aid from anti-crime organisations there is also out of reach. Companies in Britain also find it difficult to address, as although they have more resource for investigation at their disposal, the fact that the majority of these attacks seem to come from eastern Europe means that the activity is out of their jurisdiction anyway.
One answer to which companies are turning, is improved technology which can help strengthen sites against potential attack. Costa Rican company DigiDefense has been developing systems which protect sites to such a degree that it becomes increasingly difficult to build an attack large enough to have any significant impact on that site’s functionality and availability to its players. So far companies who have used the DigiDefense software have reported success in fending off attacks, Martin of eHorse being one of them: . 'We've faced at least half a dozen big attacks from these people, and the DigiDefense solution has worked well for us.'
These kinds of developments are one step against this growing area of crime, however there are still many online casino sites who remain vulnerable to attack, and industry representatives believe the problem is liable to only increase. Peter Rendall of Top Layer, a company who provides some of the technology used by DigiDefense commented: 'This is going to become a significant problem going forward,' Rendall said. 'It's not going to end tomorrow.'
Source:OnlineCasinoNews
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