Gambling Sites Battle DDoS Attacks
Gambling is hugely popular, especially with tech-savvy criminals.
Many extortionists are targeting net-based betting firms and threatening to cripple their websites with deluges of data unless a ransom is paid.
But now deep defences are being put in place by some of the UK's biggest net firms to stop these attacks.
Increasing numbers of attacks and the huge amounts of data being used to try to bump a site off the web are prompting firms to adopt the measures.
"Net firms are realising that it's not just about anti-virus and firewalls," said Paul King, chief security architect at Cisco. "There are more things that can be done in the network to protect data centres."
Mr King said the only way to properly combat these so-called Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks was with intelligent net-based systems.
Many of the gambling sites suffering DDoS attacks are in offshore data and hosting centres, so any large scale data flood could knock out access to many more sites than just the one the criminals were targeting, said Mr King.
