With the increasing popularity of online gaming, more and more gaming sites are being developed every day. Internet is a wonderful place but also prone to all kinds of dangers and cyber crimes. The most common type of danger that gaming sites are constantly vulnerable to are DDOS attacks. In this article, we are going to see what exactly DDOS attacks are, how gaming sites can ensure that they are free from the risk of DDOS attacks and what are some of the measures that protect a gaming site from a DDOS attack.
What is a DDOS attack?
Now, before we start discussing the solutions to the issue that gaming sites are facing all over the internet, we need to understand what exactly is a DDOS attack and what effect it has on a gaming site. DDoS attacks are a kind of malicious activity on the web that were initially performed for mere “fun” by the web intruders.
In a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a malicious actor leverages resources from multiple remote locations to disrupt an organization's online operations. These attacks often target network equipment and services, such as routers, naming services, or caching services, in an attempt to overload and manipulate their functioning.
25% of all gambling sites were hit by DDOS attack in June
It’s chilling and scary to observe that almost 25% of all gambling sites were hit by DDOS attacks in June this year. 25% is quite a significant number and shows how common DDOS attacks have gotten. When a site experiences a DDOS attack their online services have trouble running or don't run at all.
The DDOS attack leads to the disruption or complete shutdown of services being run by a particular website. According to the ratios in the statistics, a quarter of gambling sites’ services were manipulated by DDOS attacks which poses great vulnerability for other gambling sites on the web. It is now a popular belief that if you’re in the gambling industry, your online business is bound to experience DDoS attacks at least once.
DDOS attack can lead to huge loses
It’s well established that DDOS attacks cause losses to a business and disrupt the working of a website severely. Now, let’s talk in more detail about these losses and what exactly happens when a website undergoes a DDOS attack. DDOS attacks on sites can cause great revenue loss to a firm by putting a halt to its important revenue-generating activities and services. For gambling sites a DDOS attack can result in downtime, leading to lost revenue and consumer trust.
It is observed that most of the DDoS attacks are launched during major sporting events, such as Wimbledon. It is done so in order to drive customers away from their preferred platforms and push them towards competitor sites, which can compound the lost revenue. You’d be surprised to know that even just an hour of downtime for a gambling website, the loss caused could be significantly huge. Another scary fact about DDOS attacks is that the DDoS attackers have now adopted a blended attack strategy. With this strategy, the attackers combine various attack methods with social engineering, credential stealing and physical attacks.
How to protect your gambling site from attacks
“Protections from DDOS attacks is crucial for gambling sites”, says Dennis, casino expert, at onlinecasinoguide.in. Which is exactly why now we need to take a look at some of the measures that a firm can take to ensure they are safe from a DDOS attack.
- Minimize the attack surface area to limit the options for attackers. Reducing the attack surface area enables you to build protections in a single place.
- Equip the website with more advanced protection techniques that can go one step further and intelligently only accept traffic that is legitimate by analyzing the individual packets themselves.
- The best method to ensure safety against attacks is to use a Web Application Firewall such as SQL injection or cross-site request forgery.
