14 DAY TRIAL // Last Wednesday, January 20, the website of the Irish National Lottery was knocked offline courtesy of a DDoS attack launched by an unknown attacker.
The website was shut down for around two hours, during which time, players could not access the Web portal, nor use ticket machines to buy tickets for the Lottery's upcoming draw of £9 million ($12.8 million / €11.8 million) prize money.
The BBC reports that the attack began at 11:21 GMT, but ticket dispensers and retail offices were restored by 12:45 GMT whereas the website was back online by 13:25 GMT.
Users that have accessed the lottery.ie website since the incident have probably seen the standard CloudFlare DDoS protection system doing its magic.
Both the lottery's operator, Premier Lotteries Ireland, and local authorities have started an investigation into the incident.
The mystery remains as to why the Lottery's staff decided to link the website and the ticket retail systems together. As this cyber-attack proved, the Lottery's engineers will need to create a separate backend for the Lottery's operations and have it run on different servers than those hosting the Web portal, which will no doubt see more DDoS attacks in the coming future.
It is not uncommon for cyber-gangs to target organizations working with large amounts of money. Bitcoin traders and banks are targeted by DDoS attacks on a regular basis.