Betfair has reassured customers that their information wasn’t compromised following a hacking incident over the weekend. Turkish hacking group Turk Guvenligi followed up their attack on a Korean company by putting a number of sites at risk with their attack last night.
We contacted Betfair and they gave us the following statement:
Last night (Sunday September 4) our DNS provider, Netnames, appears to have been compromised and as a result the Betfair.com site – along with some of their other clients’ sites, UPS, the telegraph.co.uk, Acer to name a few – was redirected to a third party site believed to have been set up by the hacker. Netnames rectified the situation but it takes some time for changes to flow through. The Betfair site (our own infrastructure) itself was unaffected and we do not believe that customers were at risk as a result of the incident. The tech and security teams have been working with Netnames and are monitoring the situation closely.
The message on Betfair’s site also moved to reiterate that Betfair itself had not been hacked and it was purely the DNS record that was attacked. It meant that some visitors would have sent the hacker’s logo and not Betfair’s usual front page when they visited the site.
Due to its nature, the online gambling industry is always likely to be a target for hackers. Last Christmas Visa and MasterCard were singled out by Anonymous and it meant that bookmakers experienced problems over the busy holiday period. Shortly after this, one hacker stole 400m virtual chips from Zynga before being caught and British Colombia’s doomed online gaming site was rumored to have been a victim of hacking. This case with Betfair doesn’t sound like it had anything to with its own security and was simply a breach higher up. You can now breathe freely again.
