UK Betting Sites Hit By Simultaneous Outages

Two prominent British betting sites have experienced simultaneous outages today, with Tote offline for more than eight hours and counting, while Sporting Bet was offline for more than three hours.

A dynamically updated graph is available here. Netcraft is monitoring the performance of twenty leading UK Internet Gambling Sites, with dynamically updating graphs available here.

Industries conducting large volumes of transactions are emerging as targets for a cottage industry of digital extortionists using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks typically are preceded by a request for payment from parties who claim the ability to "prevent" an imminent attack. If no payment is made, a DDoS attack follows.

Online betting sites have been repeatedly targeted by DDoS extortionists, including a series of attacks at the outset of the Euro 2004 event and Wimbledon tennis tourney.