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Bots Attack the Online Casinos

Internet poker players may have noticed over the past several weeks that many of the major internet gambling and poker Web sites are experiencing service outages. These outages are across the board at online casino poker sites in a handful of international markets and are a result of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. DDOS assaults on online business is actually not anything new, but this latest round of DDOS attacks is the largest in the online casinos gambling industry and has put sites like Full Tilt Poker out of commission for as long as 48 hours at a time, with other shorter blackouts.

DDOS attacks are organized by criminals and often times are accompanied by extortion requests from the criminals. The criminals use “Bot armies” to attack Web sites – this time it just happened to be the online casinos gambling industry that was hit. The bots are planted on the PCs of regular internet gamblers who don’t even know they are infected, and they lie dormant on the PCs until the bots (which number in the thousands) are activated to bombard specific Web sites. The bots then overload the sites which cannot handle the enormous surge in information.

Full Tilt Poker is a top online casino poker site in the world industry and was severely targeted by the bots – in addition to shutting down the site for days, the malicious DDOS attacks have forced the company to switch to the www2.fulltiltpoker.com domain name. The company is hopeful that the move will prevent a similar assault in the near future.

There are anti-DDOS measures that the online casinos can put in place to prevent a similar event in the future. These measures basically absorb and lessen the surge in information when a site is subject to a DDOS attack and can often entirely prevent a site from being forced offline – it all depends on the size of the DDOS attack, and the bot army.