With the exponential growth in the casino industry for on-ground and online betting, the industry has become a target for bad actors. According to Technavio’s latest U.S. market research, the industry is estimated to grow by $11.42 billion between 2021 and 2025. With billions of dollars at stake, bad actors are looking for any way to monetize attacks on casino gaming organizations. From ransom-related distributed denial of service attacks (RDDoS) to the exfiltration of customer data, casino operators must constantly be vigilant in protecting systems and data.
The threat landscape over the past 18 months has significantly changed in complexity and frequency of attacks. Long gone are the days when a lone wolf attacker was manually knocking at the door. Threats range from nation-state attacks to attacks as a service, in which very organized and sophisticated teams use automated tools and bots to scour networks, looking for a way to hack in through a variety of methods that range from social engineering and email to brute force attacks on the network. Organizations are getting hit millions of times a day, and all it takes is one careless user or unpatched vulnerability to start the cascading events of a ransomware attack or the exfiltration of customer data that can later be monetized either through a ransom threat or on the dark web.