Gambling Sites Battle DDoS Attacks

the-dark-kangaroo writes "Gambling sites are fighting back against extortion from hackers using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. According to the report released by the BBC many of these attacks are coming from infected home PCs which have succumbed to a worm or virus. The gambling sites are bringing in reinforcements: Pipex, Cisco and security firm Energis are creating 'intelligent' traffic monitoring systems to help stop these attacks."

Comments

Re:I try and try..

[legoburner]

Though a lot of online casinos do that*, not all do that and it is somewhat unfair to lump all of them in as deserving of the dDoSes.

Some interesting stats about online gambling:
- Those dDoSes hit 2GB/sec. More than Energis' internal network can cope with.
- The primary dDoSers (some russian guys) were caught and arrested last year, there was a /. story about it too
- The mafia have been involved with some US sites, but I know of at least one that got shut down when the entire board of the company got arrested
- The WTO is trying to make the US ban on Internet gambling illegal
- The biggest online casino is israeli-founded/based www.888.com who do multiple billion per month in turnover. You can get house win from that by taking off about 98-99.5%. (turnover counts every value of every spin of a slot machine or every wager, remove the odds of winning % for the house win)

In conclusion, the world does not have the same laws as the US (gambling is perfectly fine in the UK for instance) and some people run responsible gambling sites and still have to put up with all the tiring crap from crackers and dDoSers.

* technically it is their affiliates who do it through affiliate programs, but same difference, they are all guilty and could crack down on it if they wanted.

Re:Devils advocate...

[d1v1d3byz3r0]

Gambling revenue, in this case, would not be going to schools as the revenue is not within states jurisdiction. To my knowledge, online gambling sites are illegal to be hosted in the states. So the money is going directly into the pockets of some guy with a Carribean bank account.

Re:Legal issues?

[nrlightfoot]

As far as I'm aware the law commonly cited as making internet gambling illegal in the US is dubiously applied to the internet, and not likely to stand up as covering internet gambling if tested in court. As far as I know there is no legal precedent for the legality of internet gambling. There are however, states which have blanket laws prohibiting any gambling, and then they make specific exeptions to the law for casinos and lotteries and such.

Re:I try and try..

[91degrees]

It seems like just desserts to me since they are responsible for a LARGE portion of the spyware that we end up removing from PC's on a regular basis.

Some of them aren't. A lot of them run a perfectly legitimate business advertising through tradiaiton means.

In addition, I fail to see what benefit you provide anyone. Someone mentioned taxes. Most of the gambling sites are located in a few countries in Central America (like Belize) where the money is usually paid to a corrupt goverment that uses it to more efficiently repress the local population. There is strong evidence that the cocaine cartels are involved.

This is because the US is so hard on gambling. The crime organisations get involved. The ones mentioned in the article seem to be UK sites. Gambling pays a decent amount to the treasury, and it tightly regulated by the government.

Re:I try and try..

[Anonymous Coward]

"One can callously point out that nobody is forced to (gamble/smoke), and that it's people's own stupidity that gets them into trouble. But I don't happen to believe that people that lack in intelligence, or have other weaknesses such as a proclivity towards (gambling/drug) addiction, deserve being taken advantage of."

This is pure BS. Poeple who try to lump Gambling in with true addictions such as drugs and smoking are simply wrong. There is no physical addiction with gambling. You won't go through withdrawl if you stop it like you do with smoking and some drugs. You don't build a "tolerence" to gambling like you do with drugs requiring you to do things you wouldn't normally do just to get it (including murder).

People who are trying to make gambling into a "disease" are simply trying to get medical insurance to pay for their theropy.

Re:Prevention?

[jwdb]

As someone stated in an earlier comment, the biggest problem is bandwidth. Your CPU may be able to handle the traffic, but when you've got a botnet spanning thousands of computers, sending you traffic in the Gb/sec range, even a serious backbone connection will begin to stutter.

Jw

Blame the right person for that

[michaelhood]

These are not the gambling sites that do this. These are affiliates. The gambling sites very much frown on spam, which is why some of them won't even accept traffic from e-mail, and other sources that is likely to be spam. But it's quite difficult for them to police traffic sources from tens of thousands of affiliates.

From the PartyPoker Affiliate Agreement:

2.13 "Spam" or "Unsolicited Promotions" means emails or any other messages that are circulated by you, directly or indirectly, including messages that are posted on newsgroups, chatboards and other types of online forums and which: 1). are directed at people who have not consented nor confirmed that they wish to receive promotional messages from you; 2). contain false or misleading statements; 3), do not truthfully identify the source or the originating IP Address; or 3). do not provide the recipient with an option to easily "Remove" them from receiving future mailings or promotions.

Re:I try and try..

[grammar fascist]

Medical bills that run into 5 or 6 figures aren't uncommon and it's a sad fact that the biggest factor in personal bankrupcy in the US is unpaid (and, more importantly, unpayable) medical bills.

I'd like you to cite a source for that. I googled for it and found a few charts, most of them indicating loss of job as the #1 cause.

Re:I try and try..

[Zooka]

"This is pure BS. Poeple who try to lump Gambling in with true addictions such as drugs and smoking are simply wrong. There is no physical addiction with gambling. You won't go through withdrawl if...."

Your understanding of "addiction" is lacking. While physical dependency on a substance is indeed not the 'exact same thing' as an uncontrollable psychological compulsion, they both CORRECTLY fall under the same general definition of "addiction".

In other words, your opinion that physical addiction is the only "true addiction"... is simply wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

Give me a break...

[t0mass]

Since when DDoS attacks are considered as hacking?
Every idiot with internet access can make a DoS attack, and not everyone with access is a hacker.

What scares me is that you are wrong.

[hummassa]

You know, if you bash the queen, the next premier (this one is a friend) and the royal family enough in the media, you can even quote "the horrible things the royal family made to stay in power in the last 400? years"... hehehe. and voila, let's invade GB, they have WMDs, they have an evil secret police they use to crush the freedom fighters in Northern Ireland. Next, US invades Ireland too, for harbouring freedom fighters... errm terrorists.

You see, I myself don't feel a lot safe, because the US government/media sees our president as a drinking communist who is building nukes, too, even if it's all far from the truth.