This week’s outage of the national lottery web site and point of sale (PoS) devices was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the company has confirmed.
In a statement to RTE News, the National Lottery said of the technical issues experienced on Wednesday 20/01/2016, “Indications are that this morning’s technical issues were as a result of a DDOS attack affecting our communications networks”.
“The issues were resolved by the National Lottery’s DDoS protection systems, limiting disruption and restoring all operations within two hours.”
The statement went on to say, “This incident is still under investigation. However, we can confirm that at no point was the National Lottery gaming system or player data affected”.
The National Lottery is protected by CloudFlare, a US provider of content delivery network and distributed domain name server services. The company says that its services sit between the visitor and the CloudFlare user’s hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for web sites.
On accessing the Lottery.ie web site today (21/01/2016), users are presented with a message that says:
“Checking your browser before accessing lottery.ie”
A link also says: “DDoS protection by CloudFlare”.
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