Online gambling cyberattacks spike during pandemic lockdown

Malicious cyberattacks against online gambling sites soared during the pandemic lockdown as scammers looked to take advantage of the sites’ increased popularity.

Technology analytics firm Neustar Security recently released its Cyber Threats & Trends Report: Jan-Jun 2020, which details a 151% surge in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period last year.

Worse, these attacks are getting more powerful and lasting longer. While attacks at the lower end of the scale involving 5 Gigabits (Gbps) or lower per second were up over 200% year-on-year – and such attacks represented over 70% of observed attacks – those at the other extreme (involving 100 Gbps or more) were up around 275%.

The longest attack duration this year was five days and 18 hours, the longest Neustar has ever observed, while the largest individual attack size was a whopping 1.17 Terabits per second, the largest that Neustar has ever mitigated (although Amazon Web Service reported a client being hit by a 2.3Tbps attack). The average attack size rose by 1Gbps year-on-year to 12Gbps.