The Role of Cyber Security in Online Gambling

Now, everyone is playing their favourite table games on their mobile phone or tablet.

14:25 31 January 2022

 

In the past decade, gambling has overwhelmingly gone digital. Gone are the days of carefully planning a weekend trip to the local casino. Now, everyone is playing their favourite table games on their mobile phone or tablet.

 

Online play has opened a world of innovation for gambling providers in United Kingdom with features like live casino play and VR technology beginning to come to the forefront. Unfortunately, though, online gambling also opens up a world of possibilities for fraudsters and scammers.

 

To these criminals, the huge amounts of money flowing through online casinos represent a goldmine of opportunity. In this article, we take a look at some of the threats facing the online gambling industry and some of the ways in which the industry looks to protect itself from cybercriminals.

 

Online Casino Cyber Threats

There are far too many cyber threats faced by online casinos to list in full in this article. Below, however, are a list of the most commonly faced threats:

 

Integrity Hacks: Would you gamble with an online casino that had dodgy games? Slots that always saw the house win or glitched blackjack mechanics that saw your bets double when you lost and half when you win? The answer is no.

 

Hackers know this and as such, seek to disrupt online casinos by rigging their games to damage their reputation. They will then hold the provider to ransom, demanding large sums of money to stop disrupting games.

 

Ransomware: When you sign up to an online casino you entrust them with your sensitive personal data. Fraudsters will find a way of gaining access to this private information and then hold the provider to ransom.

 

Either the casino pays the ransom or the fraudsters publish the sensitive personal data or worse, use it to directly defraud individual players. 

 

Account Takeovers: If a hacker gains access to the sensitive personal data of customers and doesn’t want to go down the route of holding the provider to ransom, what they often do instead is defraud individual players.

 

This is done by taking control of individual accounts and making withdrawals on their own behalf. 

 

Money Laundering: Gambling has always been synonymous with money laundering. One way to make illegal money appear legal is to pretend that it has come from a big win on the roulette wheel rather than as the profits of a drug deal.

 

Online gambling has made this a lot easier for criminals. Whereas previously one would have to go to a number of casinos to launder money without arousing suspicion, launderers can now simply make dozens of accounts with online casinos from the comfort of their own homes.

 

In doing this they can make hundreds of small bets that are almost impossible to spot as money laundering; which is tough on online casinos as they face huge financial penalties if they are found by governments to have not spotted laundering activity.

 

 

How Online Casinos Stay Safe

After reading everything above you might be starting to panic about how safe your online gambling account really is. Well fear not. Every reputable online casino has a whole host of tricks up their sleeves to keep out the fraudsters, hackers and scammers.

 

Here are just a few of the tools that your favourite online casino uses to keep your gaming sessions fair and guard your sensitive personal data:

 

Encryption Technology

The biggest online casinos on the market are just about as safe and secure as a big name bank. They use SSL Encryption Technology to ensure the safety of every financial transaction made on their platform.

 

After transactions are made, all sensitive personal data is encrypted once more before being transferred to firewall protected servers located in the provider’s gambling hub. To hack into these servers would require a level of expertise and nous well beyond the reach of your average hacker.

 

 

Third-Party Audits

The online casino that you use knows exactly what the house edge on your favourite casino game is at any given time. This helps them monitor whether hackers are manipulating the integrity of their games.

 

In addition to this layer security, reputable online casinos are regularly audited by a third-party who monitors the house edge of all their games. This not only protects consumers from fraudsters but from unscrupulous gaming providers as well.

 

Financial Histories & AI

Money laundering is a massive problem within the gambling industry and an incredibly tough thing to spot. In days gone by online providers would employ dozens of staff to look through transactions in a bid to spot money laundering activity.

 

Now, a lot of online casinos are using machine learning and AI to help pinpoint suspicious activity. Using financial histories and examples of money laundering, AI can be taught to notice the patterns of money laundering more effectively than the human eye – the tech can even predict what launderers will do before they do it themselves!

 

In Summary

Cybercriminals are innovative, well-resourced and determined, so though, are the majority of online casinos. Whilst the prowess of fraudsters, hackers and scammers may set your pulse racing it’s important to remember that they are coming up against a multi-billion dollar industry dead set on maintaining the safety and security of their customers.

 

If you’re gambling with one of the biggest names in the industry you have nothing to fear from cybercrime. If you’re not, maybe it’s time to switch over…