Sunday Paper Article on Internet Gambling

[detox]

Just reading about the connection between the organized crime and online gambling the biggest crime family or group.........no not the Mafia....The Russians.

[xtravistx]

got a link?

-xtravistx

[wdbaker]

Here is one article came out 20 minutes ago

'National' bets under threat from hacker ring By Chris Nuttall, IT Correspondent Published: February 22 2004 21:58 | Last Updated: February 22 2004 21:58 .l

Online betting on the lucrative Grand National is under threat from hackers who are blackmailing internet bookmakers with demands for money.
If they are not paid, the hackers say they will launch a co-ordinated electronic attack that could cost the betting industry heavily in lost business in the run-up to Britain's premier betting event in April.
Leading online bookmakers are understood to have received e-mail threats to paralyse their websites. These follow similar threats prior to hacker attacks that have disrupted betting on other international sporting events. The culprits are believed to be criminal gangs in eastern Europe, where skilled programmers are in abundance and computer misuse laws are lax.
Security experts say the protection racket is beginning to spread to other areas of the online world, with insurance companies that offer policies over the internet among those targeted.
Assaults on offshore websites based in locations from Gibraltar to Antigua and used by US gamblers were launched in advance of American football's Superbowl this month. The "warnings" were followed by e-mails threatening that the attacks would continue and intensify unless sums ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 (£5,375 to £26,875) were paid.
None of the companies targeted has admitted paying any money, although some offshore sites are believed to have given in to the demands in past attacks.
Representatives of more than a dozen offshore gambling sites met in Gibraltar this month to discuss a response to the threat to their fast-growing industry. Online betting is expected to increase from 1 per cent to 10 per cent of all gambling between 2000 and 2005, when it could be worth $15bn in western Europe, according to forecasts by Schema research agency.
The hackers' weapon is a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where targets are deluged with requests for information, slowing the website down to the extent of making it inaccessible to anyone wanting to place a bet.
Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaker, said its site was offline for hours this month when it suffered a DDoS attack along with other bookmakers. It said no money had been paid and the police had been informed.
Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit has been investigating the extortion racket since assaults on UK and offshore betting sites were reported last autumn.
Detective Superintendent Mick Deats, head of operations, said: "It's not clear how much research they're doing, but there was an awareness it was the Superbowl and a good time to attack, and there's a continuous string of large betting events this year, including Cheltenham and Euro 2004 [football championship]."
Sites on the UK mainland have also been hit, according to Top Layer, an internet technology company that is supplying hardware to block such attacks.
An executive at one UK-based online bookmaker said: "We have put measures in place with our ISPs [internet service providers] to strengthen our defences."

[wdbaker]

Two more recent articles below DOS attacks and gambling

Growing threat of cyber extortionists on Internet casinos
By maddy
From: Online Casino News on Feb 4th

With more than 1,800 online casinos, millions of customers around the world and millions of dollars being wagered each day website security can not remained ignored.

Computer network security companies like Riverhead Networks are tuning into the market of casino-specific online security. Riverhead is already one of the leading providers of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) solutions.


Because of efforts from companies like Riverhead, many online casinos were unaffected by the rash of attacks aimed at online gambling sites during the busiest time of the year: Super Bowl weekend.


While some online sportsbooks, went offline, unable to cope with data streamed at them at 200 megabits per second protected sites denied the denial of service attackers. Riverhead claims its customers had uninterrupted service throughout the game period.


According to Riverhead because the stakes are so high both for the websites and online gamblers, the target is attractive for extortionists—since they know no one can afford any downtime.


Typically DDOS solutions identify and filtering out malicious Internet traffic from unrecognized hosts or ISPs and provides website availability for legitimate users or customers. Riverhead’s technology automatically blocks attack packets and forwards real customer transactions, without relying on other network devices.

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AntiOnline Spotlight: Held Hostage
February 5, 2004
By Enterprise IT Planet Staff

Maximum Security for a Connected World

Most freedom-loving individuals like to believe that they don't easily bow to the demands of bullies. But in the playground we call reality, there are always those that are persuaded to part with their lunch money.
In this day and age, criminals are increasingly resorting to technology to pad their coffers with ill-gained funds. Their latest weapon of choice? Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
DoS attacks have made headlines lately because of the recent MyDoom epidemic. The stories of how SCO.com faltered under the assault while Microsoft.com endured will undoubtedly become part of our IT folklore. It goes without saying that a serious DoS attack can cripple a business that draws significant revenue from its Web operations.
It's with the threat of sidelining your business that some unscrupulous geeks are raking in someone else's hard-earned money. Failure to produce the funds promises an onslaught from an army of zombie machines that do the bidding of the extortionist.
Learn how IT pros are coping with these demands and strengthening their networks so that such threats fall on deaf ears.

Note: The opinions expressed below are solely those of the individual posters on the AntiOnline forums.
Direct link to this week's spotlight thread:
Pay us or we'll DDoS you!
m34k's observations hint at a global problem.
I do contract work for a major ISP and you would be amazed at how many DDoS attacks happen on a regular basis. Yes, they are traceable, but it can be very time consuming...
For the most part, the attacks that I've backtraced have been out of places like Bolivia, Russia and Taiwan and are not really feasible to pursue so they end up getting away with it. We just take the hit on our routers and they eventually go away.
Producer relies on heavy-duty defenses and proactive measures to counter DDoS attacks.
I see lots of dos attacks, however the big firewalls out today (CP AI and PIX that I work with) can handle them with minor traffic loss. I can trace them in a few minutes and usually kill the BGP route from the offending black hole, or foreign IP.
I have never personally seen a successful DOS attack unless its a zombie virus. Those situations are usually fixed with reverse poison DNS (takes a few hours). The Zombie Dos attacks I have seen are IP. Even if it was DNS, I could solve that too.
muert0 provides a link to Gibson Research Corporation's findings after having been DDoSed.
http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
Felonia knows first-hand what it's like to be the center of a scammer's unwanted attention. Some interesting bits...
I'm the owner of a hosting provider in Costa Rica, and for that reason we have quite a few clients in the gambling business. We have been experiencing awful DOS attacks from hundreds of Zombies all over Europe and the US and have invested in serious hardware like the WatchGuard V100 (20+ K) and secondary Internet pipes to survive these attacks, they are getting more and more sophisticated.
They use spoofed packets on port 80 so it's really difficult to solve and track unless the source computer is making over 100 connections per second.
Our clients constantly receive ransom notes from Russia asking for 30K via Western Union to stop the attacks.
Have you been on the receiving end of a DDoS attack? Share your experiences and survival tips here.

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