Technology security firm Akamai has warned that the online gambling industry is the biggest target for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, with the market accounting for 50% of all attacks in the third quarter of 2015.
According to Akamai’s latest ‘State of the Internet’ report, total DDoS attacks were up 180% year-on-year during the third quarter, with online gambling the main target.
DDoS attackers overload a website’s bandwidth with hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests, which renders it temporarily non-operational and allows the attackers to hold the site to random.
Websites are only able to resume normal operation once the ransom has been paid or if the security team can fend of the attack.
Betfair, PokerStars, Unibet and Svenska Spel are amongst the online gambling brands that have been targeted in the past 12 months.
John Summers, vice president of Akamai, said: “Akamai has been seeing greater numbers of denial of service attacks every quarter, and the upward trend continued in the most recent quarter.
“Although recent DDoS attacks were on average smaller and shorter, they still posed a significant cloud security risk.”
