Several online gambling sites in Europe including France’s Winamax and Italy’s Lottomatica were taken offline by a distributed denial of service attacks that were reported to have begun on 31st October 2019. These service outages, which lasted into at least Friday for many customers, follow a similar recent attack on Eurobet.
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These recent big distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on popular European poker and sports betting sites reinforces how much legitimate online gambling presents a plum target for cybercriminals and hacktivists. The disruption that these attacks cause is a serious threat to reputation and revenue within a hyper-competitive sector. Even the slightest flicker of a service interruption risks upsetting and driving away customers who are super sensitive to placing bets immediately, experiencing absolutely real-time streams of a game and no fuss payouts of their winnings.
The timing of these DDOS attacks is interesting given how the weekend was bookended by the climaxes to major international sporting events like the F1 Grand Prix and the Rugby World Cup Final, plus full fixtures in European football and other leagues and sports.
Online gambling sites must be ready to handle these attacks through both prevention and mitigation measures that tackle how a DDOS attack rapidly floods their gaming platforms with an overwhelming number of requests and traffic. You could have the best on-premise security solution that money can buy installed to deliver games and videos, but if your connection to the Internet gets flooded with attack traffic then you will have a significant problem. To maintain brand reputation and continue driving revenue, online casinos and sports gambling sites must harness the power of high performing networks that safeguard their digital services and absorb and neutralize the force of DDOS attacks.