During our record-breaking ‘The Return of the Leaders and Legends’ webinar, 6 of the industry’s most successful leaders gave a fascinating insight into the hottest topics in iGaming. In a series of blogs we’re going to examine how these industry experts approach the most important opportunities and challenges, and why they choose to partner with Continent 8. We start with our Innovation Director, Leon Allen, who reflects on the discussion about cybersecurity.
The nature of cybersecurity is that it is constantly evolving as new threats emerge. But during 2020 the speed of change accelerated dramatically, both in terms of the frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks. Speaking during the webinar, Microgaming CEO John Coleman, echoed the experiences of many global business leaders when he reflected on how the scale of the challenge had increased during last year.
He gave an excellent summary to explain the complexity of addressing security risks within a massive organisation which has development teams across 6 continents, with multiple companies, and hosting sites in multiple jurisdictions. ‘Traditional’ types of attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) continued, he said, but ransomware and Layer 7 bot attacks also posed a threat.
“I think it was exacerbated in 2020 with remote working,” he said. “Obviously, a lot of our organisations have rapid adoption of cloud technology and I suspect that adoption of cloud technology has come before the security teams have caught up. So, there are risks certainly there.”
With a partnership of over 20 years, we’re committed to working with Microgaming and all of our clients to develop technological capabilities to meet, and beat, these new challenges. Regarding DDoS attacks, we continue to see these as a substantial threat to the world of iGaming. For example, in Q2 2020 Continent 8 saw a 55% increase in cyber-attacks compared with the same period in 2019, and we mitigated the longest sustained DDoS attack (36.4 hours in Q4 2020) that we have ever seen.
To address the risks of the layer 7 bot attacks, last year we launched our newest product, Continent 8 Cloud WAF, which is powered by the cybersecurity experts at Fortinet. Our Cloud WAF product provides a complete solution against all known and zero-day layer 7 application attacks referred to by John.
We’re committed to providing cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions to the iGaming industry, and we’re planning to launch more exciting, innovative products this year.
During the webinar, John used an analogy which is helpful to anyone who is not an IT specialist. You can no longer rely on high walls to protect your house. It’s now essential to have bright lights, security patrols, bars on the windows, motion sensors, security patrols, alarms, and guard dogs.
That’s a good way to illustrate the heightened level of cybersecurity solutions we will be providing to ensure that iGaming businesses protect their mission-critical data and systems. It was great to hear John paying a warm tribute to Continent 8 and our partnership with Microgaming which spans more than 20 years. No matter how cyber threats evolve, our track record proves that we have the expertise to keep our clients one step ahead of the game as every new threat emerges.
To find out how we can support your business with world-leading cybersecurity solutions designed to meet the ever-changing demands of the iGaming industry, please contact our Sales Team.
Hear John’s summary on cybersecurity in the iGaming industry below.
Please check our ‘News & Blogs’ section soon for the next blog in this series.
You can find the full recording of our ‘The Return of the Leaders and Legends’ webinar here
