The entire online betting industry faces an ongoing battle in the fight against hackers and extortionists, according to William Hill"s IT chief.
In the latest of the silicon.com CIO Vision video interview series, Victor Kemeny, IT director at the UK"s largest bookmaker William Hill, said: "We have to be lucky 100 per cent of the time, whereas the bad guys have only got to be lucky once."
A number of UK bookmakers were targeted by criminal gangs two years ago, who threatened them with denial of service (DoS) attacks that would crash their websites unless they paid a ransom.
The UK"s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit eventually smashed a Russian gang involved in the online extortion racket and money laundering but the threat hasn"t entirely disappeared.