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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."
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.
/. story about it too
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
- 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.
Warhammer forums
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.
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
"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