DDoS (distributed denial of service) is not a reality that any online gaming business ever wishes to cope with, but some regulated New Jersey web sites had to do exactly that last week.

New Jersey’s fledgling online gambling industry is targeted, apparently for the first time, by these distributed attacks.

Late week that is last at least four unnamed sites were derailed by a hacker, or hackers, who flooded the sites‘ bandwidths with traffic, making them inoperable, and ultimately taking them offline for around half an hour.

The attacks were accompanied by a ransom note for an undisclosed sum, payable in Bitcoin, with a hazard of a much more serious assault to follow.

Not New, But Frustrating

DDoS attacks aren’t anything new for the online gambling industry, of course. In fact, they truly are as old as the industry itself, but there are suggestions that incidents of the unwelcome actions have been growing. Some experts even claim that assaults across all industries that are online doubled in 2014.

High-profile operators on the receiving end last year included Betfair, which was targeted on Grand National time, the UK horse race that is biggest meet of the season in terms of betting.

Attackers usually time their efforts to coincide with big sporting events in the hope that operators will merely pay up instead than lose company. PokerStars, Unibet, and state that is swedish monopoly Svenska Spel are all present victims.

Chances of Prosecution Slim

Regardless of the initial interruption, it appears that the situation has become stable and has been effectively dealt with by the latest Jersey market’s cybersecurity groups. The battle between online gambling sites and the hackers is one of pet and mouse, of strategy and counterstrategy: as protection technology improves, so do the hackers‘ efforts to breach it.

New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement President David Rebuck stated this that the matter was now being investigated by state police, the FBI, and the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, as well as his own organization week. The agencies that are various he stated, were hunting a ‚known actor‘ who had ‚done this before.‘

Chances of prosecution are slim, nonetheless. To date, only two men have been convicted for launching DDoS attacks. Those had been two UK-based Poles whom made the error of threatening an operator they knew personally and agreeing to meet him in a hotel room. The operator, of course, brought the police with him. In 2013, the pair that is hapless sentenced to five years in prison with a court in britain.

LVS Attack

Such attacks are not limited to online gambling, of program. In February 2014, Las Vegas Sands Corporation (LVS), owned by anti-online curmudgeon Sheldon Adelson, was put through a massive cyber assault that was thought to possess emanated from Iran. On 10, LVS was plunged into chaos as computers began flatlining and servers shutting down february. Hard drives were wiped clean as malware ripped through the company’s networks.

As hackers began compressing and downloading batches of sensitive files, comprising everything from high-roller credit checks to details of global pcs, the decision was taken to sever the multibillion dollar operation entirely from the Internet.

The attack caused an estimated $20 million worth of damage. The attackers subsequently claimed their DDoS actions was indeed been influenced after hearing remarks made by Adelson in 2013 about ‚dropping the bomb‘ on Iran.