Just as companies in any industry must be vigilant to protect their online customers in the digital age, real-money gaming businesses in particular must go above and beyond the call of duty to fend off cyber-criminals.
With an unfortunate degree of frequency, new published reports indicate, online gambling operators routinely find themselves the target of these criminals who attack web domains and attempt to extort money.
A recent attack on a Manchester-based online gambling site illustrates the commonality of these tactics. Two men were subsequently arrested after being accused of attempting to extort money from the Club World Casino online gambling site.
The two men, appearing before an Uxbridge Magistrates Court, allegedly made an extortion attempt in connection with a DDoS attack on the aforementioned site.
The 36-hour attack, launched August 2nd, brought down the site and prevented customers from using it. Last week, British police arrested the perpetrators at Heathrow Airport and charged them with blackmail and one count of unauthorized acts on computers under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act.
“Extortion attempts involving denial of service attacks certainly aren’t a new phenomenon,” says Graham Cluley, a security expert. “In the past there have been numerous cases of websites that have found themselves the victims of attempted blackmail by criminal gangs who threaten to bring down their website. Often such blackmailers will demonstrate their ability to flood a website with traffic from a botnet of computers, proving their ability to prevent genuine customers from reaching the site, in an attempt to convince their victims into paying large amounts of money.”
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