The July 4th holiday weekend is usually filled with hotdogs, fireworks, and some apple pie. But a DDoS attack? What asshat does that? Well, an Internet hacker is who. And one decided to attack four New Jersey online casinos to celebrate.
The attack occurred for only 30 minutes but shut down the four sites and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin or an even worse attack would take place. The Director of the Gaming Enforcement Division in New Jersey, David Rebuck, has released information on the recent attack earlier this week.
The attack took place on Thursday and is considered a distributed denial of service attack. A DDoS attack is one in which a website is flooded with data with requests for access which will leave the site unable to operate.
Rebuck stated that the short attack was followed by a larger threat by the attacker. The hacker threatened to attack again in a 24 hour time frame if a ransom of Bitcoin was not paid. The follow-up attack was to attack casinos in New Jersey as well as businesses located in Atlantic City which use the same provider for Internet service.
About
According to CloudFlare, a DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. The attacks are carried out with networks of Internet-connected machines.
These networks consist of computers and other devices (such as IoT devices)which have been infected with malware, allowing them to be controlled remotely by an attacker. These individual devices are referred to as bots (or zombies), and a group of bots is called a botnet. Once a botnet has been established, the attacker is able to direct an attack by sending remote instructions to each bot.
