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Bad luck, Ireland: DDoS attack disrupts isle's National Lottery

Attack KO'd the website and ticket machines

A DDoS attack disrupted the Irish National Lottery’s website and ticket machines on Wednesday (January 20).

The draw took place as normal despite two hours of disruption beforehand.

"Indications are that this morning's technical issues were as a result of a DDoS attack affecting our communications networks," a statement from the Lottery said, as Irish media outlet RTE reports.

"The issues were resolved by the National Lottery's DDoS protection systems, limiting disruption and restoring all operations within two hours. This incident is still under investigation. However, we can confirm that at no point was the National Lottery gaming system or player data affected," the Lottery added.

The incident follows a DDoS attack on the popular boards.ie discussion boards earlier this week.

Mark Chaplain, VP EMEA for Ixia, commented: “The availability of ‘DDoS as a service’ and large-scale botnets for hire makes it relatively easy to launch an attack that can even disrupt the operations of large, robust public websites that are designed to handle high traffic volumes.”

“Organisations can mitigate the impact of these attacks by reducing their attack surface – blocking web traffic from the large numbers of IP addresses that are known to be bot-infected, or are known sources of malware and DoS attacks. Using an appliance specifically for line-speed IP address filtering can deliver this protection by simply eliminating the malicious traffic, helping to keep resources running,” he added. ®

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