SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
William Hill has apologised to customers after criminal third-party activity in the form of a ‘sophisticated’ DDoS cyber-attack led to its websites crashing on Tuesday.
As reported in The Register, many of the bookmaker’s sites went down, and remained unable to provide better than intermittent service throughout Wednesday due to the ongoing attack. This is despite the company’s work with Darktrace, a global leader in Enterprise Immune System technology for cyber defence, which advertises its support of William Hill in a PDF brochure on its site.
A spokesman for William Hill confirmed the attack to The Register, an independent news site on the latest in the IT industry, by stating: “The online services of William Hill were intermittently impacted during yesterday following Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activity by third parties. This follows a significant increase in DDoS activity experienced by a number of online companies over recent weeks.”
Considering the company’s H1 revenue of £814 million (PDF), the 24-hour outage could have cost the publicly-listed company roughly £4.4 million, although the true figure is likely to be less as the outage affected only its online services and did not strike during any notable sports events.
