Bookmakers William Hill under siege from DDoS internet flood

IT admins are having a hell of an evening? You can bet on it! Well, on another website

William Hill is currently on the receiving end of a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

Many of the bookie's sites went down on Tuesday and have remained unable to provide much better than intermittent service into Wednesday due to an ongoing cyberattack.

We apologise as our site is still down. We appreciate this isn't ideal but we're working hard on a fix. Thanks for your patience.

— William Hill Betting (@WillHillBet) November 1, 2016

A spokesman for William Hill confirmed the attack to The Register, stating: "The online services of William Hill were intermittently impacted during the course of yesterday following Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activity by third parties."

"This follows a significant increase in DDoS activity experienced by a number of online companies over recent weeks," the spokesperson continued, presumably referring to the Mirai botnet incident.

There are indeed signs that Mirai bots are today throwing at least some traffic at the bookmakers' 141.138.130.0/24 and 141.138.131/24 IP addresses.

Skids are still trying and failing hard at knocking offline William Hill https://t.co/xEtLa0poyI

— MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) November 2, 2016

It's been a long night. We've got some services back but we're still not at 100%.

Thanks for patiently letting us get back on our feet.

— William Hill Betting (@WillHillBet) November 2, 2016

"While the attempt at disruption is ongoing our technical teams were able to restore services last night," the spokesperson added, although complaints to The Register continued into this afternoon.

William Hill said it apologised for any inconvenience caused to customers.

Considering the company's H1 revenue of £814m [PDF], the 24-hour outage could have cost the publicly-listed company roughly £4.4m, although the true figure is likely to be less as the outage affected only its online services and did not strike during any notable sports events. ®