DraftKings hit by cyberattack just before start of NFL season

[The Buzz]

Hackers attacked DraftKings last month and in response the DFS giant is trying to fight back. Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts granted the company permission to file its own private investigation toward finding the identities of those behind the denial of service attack on Aug. 8.

From Sport Techie:

The cyberattack lasted more than 20 minutes and flooded the site with three times the number of requests for information it normally receives, DraftKings revealed in court documents. No private customer or company data was compromised.

“We recently detected and immediately responded to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack,” said DraftKings Chief Legal Officer R. Stanton Dodge in a court statement. “No confidential customer or company information was compromised, however DraftKings takes security very seriously. This filing is a necessary step to identify the responsible parties and hold them accountable for their actions.”

DraftKings personnel worked for several days following the attack to end the threat and mitigate any further potential damage. The IP addresses of those responsible were traced back to several service providers, and the court order now allows DraftKings to subpoena those providers for more information.

The attack occurred just two days after DraftKings released its sports betting service in New Jersey and just a month before the start of the NFL season. A DraftKings spokesperson claimed that there is no indication that the attack is related to either event, but that a motive remains unclear.

“It could be a competitor trying to close them down, it could be people who object to gambling in general,” Jim Waldo, professor and chief technology officer for Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told the Boston Herald. “It could be someone who decided to attack DraftKings because they do a lot of advertising.”

Read more here: https://www.sporttechie.com/draftkin...known-hackers/

[econfox]

Welcome to the world of online sportsbooks. Betonline had the same thing happen at the beginning of March Madness. Something to think about this weekend as the NFL season starts in the US. Who will get a DOS attack?