14 DAY TRIAL // Expecting to bring in over $40 billion / €35.75 billion by the end of 2015, the online gambling industry is just ripe for criminals to exploit, and the easiest way to do it is through ransomware and DDOS attacks.
Gold Security, a company specialized in providing high-end IT services, among which is DDOS mitigation consulting, has put together an infographic that shows the current state of DDOS attacks targeting the online industry, which, according to its data, 50% of the times are carried out by their competitors, not just cyber-criminals.
By comparing the costs needed to rent a botnet ($40/h) to the damages a DDOS attack can cause a company ($40,000), Gold Security shows that, by targeting the online gambling industry, cyber-criminals have pretty high chances of extracting ransom payments from their much wealthy victims, which have quite a lot to lose with every hour of downtime.
Most of these companies are also very likely to pay up, because of the nature of their infrastructure. Since most online gambling games are played in real time, any delay in the user's gameplay is likely to make them pull out of games and move to other (unaffected) sites.
This explains why, in most cases, targets are often hit once a week on average, and the total attacks carried out during the week affect around 10% of the entire online gambling industry.
This phenomenon is quite widespread in the industry, 90% of all companies reporting having been attacked in the past year at least once.
The infographic below and even more details can be seen on Gold Security's blog.
