Dos Attacks | Gambling Sites, This Is A Holdup
Online Gambling Sites, This Is A Holdup
Business Week report about the denial of service attacks hitting the online gaming operators and deduce that soon the cyber attackers will start to target government institutions and banks etc.
Organized criminal hackers threaten to paralyze their networks if they don't pay up. Something nasty was up. It was an autumn afternoon in the offshore gambling haven of Costa Rica. The banks of computers at online bookmaker Betcris.com whirred away, processing thousands of bets on the Cowboys, Patriots, and Buckeyes. All at once a flood of blank incoming messages inundated the computers, slowing traffic to a crawl. Within hours, the manager of Betcris.com, Mickey Richardson, received a threatening e-mail. The English was broken, but the message was clear: What he had experienced was a mere taste of a massive denial-of-service attack. If he wanted his computers to stay up and running through the football season, he was to wire a total of $40,000 to 10 different accounts in Eastern Europe.
The extortionists may be just beginning to flex their muscle. Industry experts fear that they could soon target government operations, e-commerce companies, banks -- practically any organization with an online presence.Read more from the Business Week report ~ Gambling Sites, This Is A Holdup
