Gambling Sites Wait for Attacks

COSTA RICA – As reported by Wired Magazine: "As Super Bowl weekend approaches, Mickey Richardson, general manager of BetCRIS, an online gambling site based in Costa Rica, readies himself for the action. But there's also a cloud hanging over his, and other gambling sites' profitable Feb. 6 weekend.

"An e-mail could come at any moment threatening to take down the site unless $40,000 or more is paid to an anonymous account.

"Online gambling was, and still is, an industry ripe for the picking and extortion attempts like these are fairly common, not just around the Super Bowl. According to gaming analysts River City Group, estimated 2004 revenues for online gambling reached more than $7 billion. About 350 companies run at least 1,700 gaming sites. It's also a largely unregulated industry -- many of these companies are headquartered offshore in countries without ample law enforcement resources to pursue hackers thousands of miles away, so the site operators often feel the pressure to pay.

"…Security firm Symantec found in its most recent Internet Security Threat Report that e-commerce was the most targeted industry from all types of cyber-attacks. The company also observed a disturbing increase in the number of bots available to attackers, from roughly 2,000 a day in early 2004 to more than 30,000 per day in September. And the CSI/FBI 2004 Computer Crime and Security Survey found that other than viruses, denial of service attacks caused more financial losses than any other cyber-security breach…"