Zombies, Your Sportsbook, and You

READ MORE: Denial of Service, Extortion, Online Casinos, Online Gambling

Ask any owner of an offshore online sportsbook what one of their biggest concerns is, and it’s not necessarily making up the difference when they’re a half point off on the Jets/Ravens line. It’s Internet extortion, which can shut down their sites for hours or days at a time. The New Yorker has a pretty nifty article about these “denial of service” zombie attacks, and since we’re geeky like that, we’ll throw you a link and a quote:

In the late spring of 2003, Mickey Richardson, the general manager of Betcris, a Costa Rican-based gambling firm, received an extortion e-mail… The letter requested five hundred dollars in eGold—an online currency—and was followed by an attack that crippled Betcris’s Web site, its main source of revenue. Richardson couldn’t afford to have the site disabled. He paid the five hundred dollars.

The extortionists began hitting other offshore bookmakers. One firm after another paid up, anywhere from three thousand to thirty-five thousand dollars, which they wired to addresses in Russia and Latvia.

Just for fun, check this article out next. Arguably, a hacker or virus-writer does more true economic damage than a murderer does, so why aren’t we frying them too?

The Zombie Hunters [The New Yorker]
The Economic Logic of Executing Computer Hackers [Slate]