Hong Kong based online gambling sites suffered an unusually high amount of distributed denial of service attacks in April.
Such attacks are designed to flood a site with information requests causing them to crash. They usually are followed by a ransom demand to stop the attack.
The International Business Times reported that the Security Engineering and Response Team at Arbor Networks detected the spike of traffic in at least 29 online gambling and gaming sites during the first two weeks of April.
According to the report, an influx of traffic from China began in the territory on April 6 and continued through April 13. During the attacks, Hong Kong topped the US, which routinely receives the highest percentage of DDoS attacks.
According to Kirk Soluk’s manager of Arbor Networks’ Threat Intelligence and Response team, the attacks were likely an attempted extortion attack.
“Gambling sites and gaming sites that have a financial component are a particularly attractive target,” Soluk told International Business Times, “due to the money the sites stand to lose if they are not available.”
However, it is unclear who carried out the attacks, even though most emanated from China.
“Geography has to be taken in proper context, particularly when considering the source of an attack,” Soluk told the paper. “It is easy for an attacker sitting anywhere in the world to launch a DDoS attack from anywhere else in world.”
