Camelot dismisses lottery website hack claims

Camelot maintains the National Lottery website it runs is secure, following the publication of a supposed breach on an underground hacking forum.

The same Romanian group that discovered SQL injection problems on the website of Kaspersky, BitDefender, and other anti-virus vendors in recent weeks has posted screen shots of supposed flaws on the national-lottery.co.uk site.

Unu, a member of the hacker group, claims that "an unsecured parameter allows access to the database" behind the website. The screenshots appear to illustrate partially redacted listings from a database table and partial login credentials for an admin account.

However Camelot, the firm that runs the UK's National Lottery including its online version, said it was confident its systems are secure.

"Camelot can confirm that the main player site at www.national-lottery.co.uk has not been compromised, as outlined on softpedia.com [story here]," it said in a statement. "As a result, there is no risk to company or player information."

"We do our utmost to continually ensure that our interactive systems are as secure as possible, and regularly review the extensive measures in place to safeguard our players. We have implemented industry standard technical solutions to protect our systems and to ensure that player information is kept secure at all times."

Despite Camelot's assurance, security watchers think Unu's posting illustrates cause for concern. Gareth Catterall, a security analyst at Sophos said SQL injection attacks are nearly always significant. "This is obviously a vulnerability that would need to be cleaned up. In my personal opinion, with an information-revealing vulnerability such as this it can be only a matter of time before full penetration can occur," he said. ®