UK lottery apologises for DDos attack

The UK National lotteries operator Camelot was forced to apologise after a DDoS attack brought down their servers a few hours before the draw.

A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDos) is when multiple systems become compromised as a result of them being overloaded, either in terms of their bandwidth or a single targeted system.

The attack come an hour and a half before the draw was to be made, meaning that those attempting to purchase tickets online just before the lottery was drawn were unable to do so. The attack left some people outraged after the jackpot rolled over for the sixth week in a row.

An apology was later issued on Twitter. The National Lottery commented: “We’re very sorry that many players are currently unable to access The National Lottery website or app. Our 46,000 retailers are unaffected. Please accept our sincere apologies if you were unable to play tonight’s games due to the website issue that affected many players.”

The DDoS attack does draw light on the dangers which many gaming operates with online vectors face and is not the first time a lottery has been targeted. The Irish National lottery suffered a similar attack last year. It is apparent that cyber security is a huge threat.

Camelot, the company who operates the UK National Lottery, will be hoping that Tuesday night’s EuroMillions jackpot of £167m will help people to forget the mishap.

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Harrison Sayers
Gambling Writer

Harrison Sayers is a journalist and editorial professional specialising in the gambling and iGaming sector. He began his career at Gambling Insider, where he served first as Editorial Assistant (July 2017 – November 2017) and then as Staff Writer from March 2018 to October 2018, contributing news coverage and industry analysis to both the publication’s digital and print channels.

Since then, he has continued his career in gambling regulation and compliance journalism, working with GamblingCompliance and VIXIO where he covers regulatory issues and industry developments across European and African jurisdictions.

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