By August Darnell | February 21, 2008

For reasons that may never be made clear, scores of internet gambling sites were the victims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for at least a week this month.While the attacks may have started sooner, the internet watchdog group, the Shadowserver Foundation, found that they ran at least from February 10 through February 18.

PartyGaming’s casino gambling site, Party Casino, was one of the targets, as were Full Tilt Poker, Virgin Poker, CD Poker, and Titan Poker.Many Russian gambling websites were hit as well.The DDoS attacks essentially flooded the sites with GET requests, overloading them and causing them to crash.CD Poker actually seemed to handle the attacks well, according to the Shadowserver Foundation, as its site stayed up.Full Tilt and Titan were not so lucky.Both had to redirect traffic to alternate IP addresses and Full Tilt, in particular, had trouble with its poker software earlier this week.

Several hypotheses have been mentioned to explain why these attacks happened, but whether they are precursors to an extortion, sabotage by a competitor, or just some hackers playing around, there is no definitive answer yet.

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