DDOS Danger For Online Gambling Sites

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.online-casinos.com/news/news6272.asp

Online-Casinos.com
February 20, 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?


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