According to the Q3 2015 State of the Internet Security Report, the online gaming industry was the target of half of the recorded distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the third quarter of 2015. Online gaming came in at exactly 50%, followed by software and technology at 25% and financial services at 7%.

The average attack internet-wide was 1.57 million packets per second (Mpps) and the highest volume attack was 222 Mpps, a record high. According to Networks Asia, “Online gaming has been the most targeted industry for more than a year.” The average length of a DDoS attack on an online gaming site was 18.86 hours, or a little less than a full day.

John Summers, Vice President of the Cloud Security Business Unit of Akamai, was quoted by Networks Asia as saying, “Akamai has been seeing greater numbers of denial of service attacks every quarter and the upward trend continued in the most recent quarter. Although recent DDoS attacks were on average smaller and shorter, they still posed a significant cloud security risk.”

If you’re an avid reader of PocketFives, then you know that we’ve reported on several DDoS on online poker sites, including one that hit four regulated New Jersey sitesin July. According to NJ.com, a hacker demanded that a ransom be paid in bitcoin, else further attacks would follow.

In 2014, hackers, allegedly Iranian, targeted the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. In that attack, “Numerous systems were felled, including those that run the loyalty rewards plans for Sands customers, programs that monitor the performance and payout of slot machines and table games at Sands’ US casinos, and a multi-million-dollar storage system.”

Also in 2014, potential DDoS attacks were unearthed at the Merge Gaming Network, while the Equity Poker Network was also a target. As Online Poker Report’s Chris Grove put it at the time, “DDoS attacks are a part of the normal course of business, especially when it comes to online gambling.”

There was a 180% increase in DDoS attacks in the third quarter of 2015 compared to Q3 2014 and, according to the report, they were generally less powerful and shorter in duration.

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