According to a report by Netcraft, several UK bookmakers have experienced lengthy downtimes last week as betting action mounted ahead of Sunday\’s Super Bowl.
UKBetting and TotalBet went down simultaneously early on Sunday, preceded by a similar period of slowed response time on Friday.
Netcraft said the timing of the outages suggested they were caused by attacks perpetrated by extortionists.
In a growing trend, betting sites are frequent targets of internet criminals that seek payoffs by threatening site operators with denial of service attacks.
The scams gain leverage when timed to key sporting events with heavy betting action about to take place, making downtime much more costly to the betting sites, and as a result, more likely that an extortion demand will be paid.
Calculators
