Online Gaming Site Outages
19th February, 2008
Over the last week many online poker and casino companies have suffered problems with their sites. Full Tilt Poker was the largest of them with their website being rendered inaccessible for a couple of days. As of 5am today the website is being redirected to www2.fulltiltpoker.com.
Following the investigations into the outages, it has been revealed that they were caused by a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service).
A DDoS attack is when the target machine is loaded with extensive communications requests so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable.
The attacks started on February 10th and stopped on February 18th.
Many other companies were also targeted in the attacks such as Titan Poker, Virgin Games and Party Casino and a number of Russian gambling sites.
The extent of the attacks was different with each site, dependant on the scale of the attack and whether the victims had any anti DDoS measures in place. Full Tilt Poker is still having issues with their software, presumably related to the attacks and suffered an embarrassing outage during the final table of the FTOPS main event.
The motive for the attacks remains undiscovered but many say the likely reason will be related to extortion. Whether an extortion attempt was made or will be made was undisclosed. Most sites are now up and running again with the remaining problem sites due to be running again shortly.
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