The Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity in iGaming: Protecting Your Business from Cybercrime

The American comedy heist film Ocean’s Eleven that was released on Friday 7th December, 2001 had a great run ending the weekend at the box-office. Specifically, the main characters of the film are two friends who plan to rob three large casinos in Las Vegas of $160 million. Entertainment Weekly celebrated it as being “the most winning robbery sequence of the decade.” However, 20 years ago, a casino heist demanded a great amount of planning and a great crew of charm and likability of the protagonists – at least in the movies. A current casino is much more a virtual space, where most of activities and transactions are managed online, and cybercriminals can arm themselves for a major heist within several hours. Gamblers today are forced to switch to online gambling sites when physical casinos closed off their doors as a result of COVID-19 bedlock. A study in the UK observed that habitual gamblers placed their bets six times frequently over the World Wide Web as they did before the COVID-19 outbreak. Credit Canada noted that it has been receiving more clients in cases to do with financial problems resulting from increased gambling on the Internet. Currently, the US Online Gambling and betting market estimate is $61.5 billion USD in 2021 and is expected to reach $114.4 billion by 2028. This fast-growing market has been noticed by cybercriminals as the new area of making money whereas it also exposes numerous weaknesses in cyberspace. While real chips, fake currency and slot cheating are used by traditional criminals to defraud online gaming sites, today’s criminals hire professionals to perform Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and user account fraud. While land-based gambling establishments have very tight internal security and cameras, the security of best casino Australia sites or any other sites present on the internet depends on the solutions created by IT specialists.

Emerging Challenges and Innovative Tools in Combating Cybercrime

A study found that of the cyber stakeholders attacked in Q3 of 2020, 76 percent of them were in online games and betting. Even if some of the iGaming companies have been investing in cybersecurity solutions, changing dynamics have made it compulsory to redesign the companies’ cybersecurity policies. Intelligent bots in today’s world are well developed enough to mimic human activity and, therefore, they are three times harder to recognize. Further, due to the war happening in Ukraine with Russia recently, state-sponsored actors are now focusing on DDoS attacks on critical infrastructure. On the same note, the businesses are experiencing a high rate of citizen fraudsters and cybercriminal incidents occasioned by the pandemic. Thus, the question comes, what should iGaming companies do to enhance their operational security against the contemporary cyber threats? Here are some of the ways that can assist business enterprises to prevent their online operations and sales.

1. Implement multi-layered cybersecurity measures to safeguard against disruptions caused by DDoS and bot attacks

Here, the owners of online gambling and sports betting sites are under immense pressure to keep their sites online always since transactions occur in real-time and visitors could be moved to other sites by simple delays. DDoS attacks remain a big threat because, for instance, such attacks can compromise a site’s availability for hours or days, therefore inconveniences that cost businesses up to $40,000 per hour. The attacks can be performed in multiple layers which is really a challenge to detect and eliminate. Among the defined attack types, the application layer attacks are especially dangerous because they overload services or databases with a large number of application calls and act as normal users. These can work around any firewall security and biometric identification facilities that may exist. To remain strong and efficient against these threats, the iGaming business must incorporate a real-time payment monitoring system having behavioral analytics that are based on data gathered from the network, the application, and the application payload.

2. Stop cybercriminals, not your revenue

Conventional approaches to cybersecurity are commonly inadequate in rapidly and efficiently identifying novel cyber threats. Some main challenges of conventional firewalls, namely, traffic filtering capabilities that characterize them as the devices capable to block network traffic only at layer 3 and 4, become critical during DDoS or other high-rate attacks. These limitations mean that the legitimate customers can be locked out if they are on the IP address or the port as the attackers hence a lot of false positives, annoyed customers, and lost business. As for the modern approaches, the usage of unsupervised and supervised machine learning to predict new threats and build unique customer profiles is used. These self-learning models are enabled to be automatically updated; therefore, they can pass risk scores to the transactions in milliseconds. This ensures that only illegitimate transactions are prevented from going through while genuine transactions are not affected in any way.

3. Secure gamers’ accounts

Cybercrimes pose a threat not just to revenue, but also to players’ personal and payment data as gambling and betting firms hold such information. There are also threats such as account compromise and other related identity attacks. The targeted businesses must protect these players’ accounts because their security affects the corporations’ reputation. To manage such risks, there is the need to undertake constant real-time screening and transaction monitoring with the possibility of automatic risk scoring among the iGaming firms. It is crucial to monitor the Internet for such activities, as this makes it possible to block relevant behavioral patterns and suspicious incidents that might negatively impact the companies’ brands.

4. Keep a close watch on the vulnerabilities in your system

Of course, purchasing cybersecurity solutions and hiring a competent team are indispensable; nonetheless, it is similarly vital to periodically identify one’s insecurity or an area that has potential threats. An online gambling company might be adequately good at providing player authentication solutions while at the same time very poor in other aspects of security. What data does your business need at a moment’s notice? Is this data immediately at one’s disposal when it is required? Are there different securities implemented: the ones securing the network and the ones securing applications? Is the identification of the right types of threats being conducted? It should be noted that incorporating these questions into the regularly scheduled security concerns with the team means that the organization will be aware of the new threats and possessing this all-encompassing security.

5. Protect cryptocurrency and digital transactions

As more organizations integrate cryptocurrencies for sports stakes and online betting, featuring protection for digital money has to be part of organizations’ cybersecurity plan. Using a single platform to inhibit fraud and analyze digital transactions while providing insight to your team in real time protects your business from the ill-intentioned and your investments.

6. Maintain compliance

It is worth noting that gambling is controlled hence calling for compliance with the Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Supplier (KYS) requirements that affect business operations. Further, online gambling operators will have to ensure compliance measures related to anti-money laundering measures to evade penalties, and in some of the countries, to report cases of cyber threats. Real time transaction monitoring which is integrated with machine learning and behavior analytics will strengthen the security of iGaming businesses because it would be able to distinguish between actual players and possible fraud. Since many digital business transactions are real-time, it becomes very important that your security solutions should not lag, so as to keep business risks to the barest minimum.