The UK National Lottery has confirmed that a DDoS attack knocked out its official website on Saturday evening. There are Lotto draws on Saturday and the activity on the lottery operator’s website is usually higher that day.
Lottery tickets can be purchased from authorized retailers around the UK or online via the National Lottery’s official website or mobile app. However, lottery players were not be able to use the much quicker online option on Saturday.
The lottery operator confirmed on the next day that its website had indeed been taken offline due to a DDoS (or distributed denial of service) attack. Generally speaking, such attacks prevent websites from functioning properly by flooding them with an amount of traffic they cannot sustain.
Unfortunately, as experienced by many companies,The NL website was subject to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) ^Nat
— The National Lottery (@TNLUK) 1 October 2017
The National Lottery apologized via Twitter for the inconvenience caused to all its customers after facing a wave of complaints from frustrated lottery players.
This has not been the first time that the National Lottery’s website has been targeted by violators. Another instance of suspicious activity on the lottery operator’s website occurred late last year. The National Lottery, which is managed by the Camelot Group, admitted back in November 2016 that the online accounts of around 26,500 players had been feared to have been compromised after their log-in details were allegedly reached by an unknown third party.
However, no funds had been deposited or withdrawn from the affected accounts and no activity had been registered after the alleged hack. The National Lottery currently has more than 9 million registered players on its online platform.
William Hill Was, Too, Target of DDoS Attack
Cybercrime has seen its power grow exponentially over the past several years and this has made it an important moneymaker for individuals and criminal groups. And the online gambling industry has turned into a favorite target for cybercriminals.
Gambling businesses and their online operations, in particular, store huge volumes of important information about their customers. In addition, it is important to mention that gambling is an industry that involves the daily movement of huge amounts of money, hence the big probability of it falling victim to cyber wrongdoers.
The National Lottery has not been the only UK gambling operator to see the normal course of its operations disturbed by a DDoS attack over the past year.
Last year, bookmaker William Hill’s website was targeted with a DDoS attack on a Tuesday night and at a time when UEFA Champions League games were played. Luckily for the operator, its smartphone app remained unaffected, which prevented it from further losses during that busy time of the week. The William Hill attack occurred shortly after other popular, non-gambling, websites such as Spotify, Twitter, and SoundCloud were, too, disturbed by cyber wrongdoers.
