"Online Gambling Concerns are Concerned about Online Security"

An online gambling industry forum, which includes the largest UK gambling operations, has been working toward the minimization of security risks on the Internet by persuading Internet service providers to set up firewalls for their clientele.

This is in response to several incidences of compromised security which have resulted in a series of denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Each of these has the possibility of ruining online gambling companies. This results from its effectiveness in slowing down the ISP’s network. What such hackers typically do is to threaten e-commerce Web sites with a paralyzing attack in order to get these companies to pay them money.

One online gambling site operation that did experience such an attack is Blue Square. Peter Pedersen, their top technology officer stated that their company has been working to get Internet Service Providers to set up firewalls for their customers, to protect them. Following the distributed denial-of-service attack experienced by Blue Square, this matter has become of increasing interest to ISPs. Betfair’s chief technology officer David Yu, has expressed similar concerns which he voiced in an interview last year with “ZDNet UK”. There are some Internet Service Providers that are beginning to deal with this problem.

In these attacks, somewhere between one and two gigabytes of data per second, are being sent to the site resulting in the clogging of the site’s bandwidth. This results in stopping activity at the site altogether. Blue Square’s Pedersen is pushing for Internet gambling companies to form a joint front against these hackers through the sharing of security resources.

The abovementioned online forum is also trying to make MPs aware of the seriousness of this problem and of the threat that it poses to practically the enter British business community. In fact all such businesses stand a risk of being placed under cyber attack.

This coming Tuesday the British Parliament will be discussing this topic for ten minutes. It is to decide whether or not the 1990 Computer Misuse Act should be update. During this time MP Derek Wyatt will be introducing a proposal designed to make such denial-of-service attacks illegal. The European VP of security strategy for Computer Associates, Simon Perry, although he commends Wyatt in his attempt to carry out something that might address this problem and raise public awareness of it, doubts that the devotion of only ten minutes to the problem of cyber attacks is going to accomplish much of anything. In addition to this, since general elections are only weeks away, proposed changes in the law are not likely to pass.