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Sex & gambling

Posted on 13 Aug 2008 at 11:31

A more likely attack would be for hackers to install a keylogger on your machine when you arrive at the site - since, after all, a significant proportion of casino visitors are likely to enter a credit card number. It's an obvious risk, and one you'd hope would inspire the operators to take security very seriously. However, it's been suggested that the nature of the business in fact allows sites to take a blasé approach." People want to gamble - for some people, it's an addiction. So they're going to keep going to these sites even if they think there might be a risk," says Nick Billington, BitDefender's UK country manager.

"I've spoken to people who run gambling sites," he adds, "and I know for sure that their only concern is their share value. They're only interested in protecting people if the problem gets so bad that people stop going to that site." Since credit card fraud is all but impossible to trace to a particular source, a gambling site could in theory be an accessory to a significant level of crime without its business suffering.

As Andrew Lee notes: "With a casino site, it's very easy to get people to give you their credit card details." Yet a survey of gambling sites worldwide conducted by Juan Manuel of the Universidad del Itsmo, Guatamala, suggested that 15% of site operators had criminal records.

Once again, though, our own tests failed to bear out the worst-case scenario. It's impossible to detect fraud that takes place at the server back-end, but our scans for hosted malware (such as hosted keyloggers) came up entirely blank. We found no trace of malware anywhere within the first 200 search results for common terms such as "gambling", "betting" and "poker". Nor did we find a whiff of scandal on any site accessible from the UK.

A search for "win money gambling" did produce pages with a search engine hijack exploit on the fourth and ninth pages of results; but to be honest, these would arguably do you less harm than the "guaranteed" gambling systems that came up on the first page.

Risk rating: MEDIUM
The dangers out there range from malware to credit card fraud. But with proper protection and a degree of caution, you can get your kicks in relative safety.

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