Four Casinos in AC Under Cyber Attack

According to the reports by the authorities, online pages of four Atlantic City casinos have become targets of an unknown hacker who promised that the attacks will continue unless he receives a payment in Bitcoin.

Troubles started on Thursday, July 2nd and continued over the weekend until Sunday. The initial attack only lasted about 30 minutes and was only meant to show that the hacker(s) meant business. After their ransom demands were not met 24 hours later, another much more powerful DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack was launched which, according to investigators, was so powerful that it had potential to hurt not only the targeted sites, but everybody sharing the same Internet provider.

It was not revealed what was the amount requested by the hacker(s), but David Rebuck, Director of New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, hinted that they had some idea about who the attacker might be, cryptically saying: He's a known actor. He's done this before.

While online gambling sites in the U.S., where regulated online gambling is rather new, are not targets of these types of attacks very often, it's been happening quite a bit offshore, and hackers usually demand some type of ransom to stop the abuse.

The four sites that came under attack this time were not named, but there was a similar attack, at least in terms of magnitude, back in 2014 when the gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson and his Las Vegas Sands came under heavy fire, compromising a number of sites and employees' information.

The motivation for that attack was not financial, however, but rather political, at least judging by the messages left on the site after the attack. It seemed that the intrusion was an answer to Adelson's comment that perhaps a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Iranian desert to move the negotiations over the nuclear program along.

Regardless of the motivation, these types of attacks are always very unpleasant for the domain owners as apart from the direct damage and potential business lost due to outage, there is always the feeling of information vulnerability following these occurrences. For gambling operations that store hundreds of thousands pieces of personal data, this is not something their customers want to see or hear about.

Despite of always increasing security measures, it seems that hackers find the way to get through whenever they set their minds to it. Due to sensitive information they are privy to and big amounts of cash they have at their disposal, casinos represent prime targets for the attackers looking to improve their financial situation, so it would hardly come as a surprise if similar attempts happen again in the future.