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Technology you can bet on

Posted on 14 Oct 2008 at 12:37

Nevertheless, thorough load-testing and forward planning helped Paddy Power serve a record number of transactions per minute during this year's Grand National, even if the site did occasionally return a blank page. "We can't close the door," O'Donnell laments. "If you own a shop where you can get 50 customers inside and the 51st is locked outside, the first 50 get good service and he gets none. In the internet environment, if there are 100 customers trying to get in, and you have capacity for 50, they all get half a service rather than 50 getting good service and 50 getting none. That's another challenge."

Security threats

Sufficient capacity is certainly a pre-requisite for another type of challenge the bookmakers face: security threats. In 2004, a gang of Russian hackers was arrested for blackmailing several of the UK's leading bookmakers with demands for £20,000 to halt a series of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. The Russians were using the Syn Flood attack to overwhelm the bookmakers' servers with repeat connection requests, taking out several of the big names for hours or even days at a time.

Paddy Power's John O'Donnell said his site has measures in place to combat such brute force. "We've probably had half-a-dozen DDoS attacks at various stages over the past five years, some of them more serious than others," he said. "There are lots of pieces of equipment out there that are very good at diagnosing and dealing with distributed attacks, particularly Syn attacks, but you have to have lots of bandwidth capacity to effectively deal with an attack."

Yet, O'Donnell is far from complacent. "The last thing I'd ever do is sit here and tell you we were well able to deal with any Denial-of-Service attack or any other security attack, because things move too fast," he warned. "There are all sorts of external and internal security threats that can happen. Potentially, some sort of network intrusion, SQL injection attack, or somebody who went after your data - that would be your biggest."

Unusually for a bookmaker, O'Donnell wasn't prepared to offer odds on the likelihood of a security attack succeeding. But I'd bet my shirt that the odds were longer than the blue ball coming out first from the Lottery machine... and somewhat shorter than Bono's chances of becoming Pope.

Author: Barry Collins