You may have noticed that williamhill.co.uk went dark on Tuesday afternoon. The reason? A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
What happened?
William Hill confirmed that they had experienced a DDoS attack on Tuesday, which caused the website to go dark, essentially suspending all services in order to fix the problems that resulted from the attack.
The sports betting operator and online casino said that “third parties”, who remained unspecified, had been behind the attack. The technical services have been working feverishly since Tuesday afternoon to restore service to 100%, but many punters will have noticed that they were unable to place bets at the popular sports bettor.
Even on Wednesday services remained intermittent. Whilst William Hill advised users to access their services via the mobile app, plenty of people who tried via browser remained disappointed.
That was especially vexing for those who wanted to place bets on the UEFA championship match between Arsenal and Manchester City. Needless to say that this DDoS proved quite costly for William Hill.
How does a DDoS attack work?
The techs at William Hill, who resignedly called it a night last night, offered a suitable explanation for what was happening. Imagine wanting to go to a William Hill betting store and finding that hundreds, if not thousands, of people were blocking the entrance. They are just milling around and don’t even want to place bets. But they prevent those, who actually want to get into the store from doing so.
Instead of people blocking an entrance, attackers use so-called ‘bots’. These bots are swarming William Hill’s servers and thus prevent legitimate access for visitors trying to place bets and play slots.
Such attacks have been quite common in recent years, but activity has significantly increased in the past few months. One such attack targeted servers of the US-based company Dyn. Attackers used a new botnet, which included the use of devices such as digital video recorders, security cameras and more. It was massive attack that resulted in outages on Twitter, Netflix, Reddit and other such sites.
DDoS attacks are never friendly. They are indeed a form of cyber terrorism and can disrupt services significantly. They can also be very expensive for the victims.
William Hill is not the first online casino or sports bettor to be attacked, but undoubtedly one of the biggest names in the industry to suffer from one.