DraftKings wins court order to unmask DDoS attackers

Daily fantasy / sports betting operator DraftKings is taking legal action to unmask the perpetrators of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against its website.

Last Thursday, DraftKings filed a complaint with the US District Court for Massachusetts alleging that 10 unidentified defendants launched a DDoS assault that knocked DraftKings’ website offline for 26 minutes on August 8. The company insisted that no confidential company or customer data was accessed during the attack.

DraftKings traced the source of the data bombardment to a number of internet service providers (ISP), and asked the court for the right to subpoena these ISPs to uncover the identities behind the IP addresses that launched the attacks.

DraftKings says the first DDoS attack came on August 7, but the company’s digital defenses were able to blunt this attack. A larger attack was launched the following day that involved three times the normal volume of requests the site usually handles.