BetOnline Continues to Struggle With Site Outage

In what has to be the worst two weeks for a major online sportsbook in recent years, Betonline continues to struggle to return their main site to operation. There have been reports of people being able to access their account via tablet.betonline.ag but when one of our users tried that site he got a prompt asking him to verify all his information, including a box that simply says “security answer” without any type of security question. So he could not gain access.

Another reader reset the password at alternate site (betonline.com), and received an email with a link to reset it that pointed to betonline.ag, which of course was offline.

The attack was a memcache hacking attack that affected over 7000 site in the first week. The affected site will usually get an email directing the site owner to pay a ransom to get their site back. There is no word on whether Betonline received this message from the attacker or not but most likely they did.

The email will usually demand the site owner send a bitcoin payment to a newly generated bitcoin address. Each email is said to have a different receiving address so that the hacker knows which website owner paid the ransom. Also all the bitcoin addresses help add to the concealment of the hacker’s identity.

There is no guarantee a hacker will turn the site back on if a site owner does pay the ransom. Plus, we all know what happens when you deal with terrorists. They don’t go away and ride off in the proverbial sunset. They return and ask for more money or share the info with other nerdowells.

Betonline did the right thing in addressing the problem in-house and biting the bullet. Upgrading security, changing networks, blocking countries, these are all part of the repair plan. However, the process usually doesn’t take nearly this long so we would suspect that something has gone very wrong in the process.

most recent tweet from Betonline management:

UPDATE: Significant progress w/network issues over last 24hours. Upgrades continue but there will be outages throughout the day (all devices). This is huge step forward. Email going out shortly w/more details. Thanks again for your patience.

— Dave Mason (@DaveMasonBOL) March 14, 2018

The hacks come from countries that do not have good law enforcement or countries whose law enforcement looks the other way when they attack a site or property belonging to a country (or person of that country) of which they deem to be an adversary. Attacks that come against North American related websites are most likely to be from China or Russia. Third on that list is Turkey. But number two overall on the cyber hacking source country list is people (or servers) of the United States itself. – source securitytoday.com article ” Top Five Countries Where Cyber Hacks Originate ”

There is no telling how much business may have been lost in the last two weeks of missed betting action or the ripple effects this will have on would-be customers.

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