A week in the life of...
Man, this has been a crazy week in the office.
There were three (or was it four?) _go-live_s for different clients, two of them with the parts of the system that directly concerns me (read web site). A series of 8am-20am working days is not something I wish to continue. Especially when it extends to Saturday as well (10am-5pm). Start of the football (US: read soccer) season is the crazy time in bookie business and I can’t wait for things to get back in normal and get quiet a bit.
Kids, get your math in order
One new thing was added this year, to the usual frenzy of new clients and white labeling deals for the old clients. Bookie web sites are often a target of DDoS attacks, with various groups trying to milk some easy money from the bookies. The previous two weeks, we had several testing events of them trying out various ways of overloading the servers and bandwidth.
Blackmailers usually ask 50k/month for “protection” (how cheesy) or they will shutdown the web sites when bookie need them most. Like season start, cup finals, world cups and events like that.
I really can’t believe these people. Do they really think that any bookie would pay them? There are dozens of proven ways to protect yourself from such attacks. Hence most they can do is to disrupt the service for an hour or two at most (that being generous). The potential loss for the bookies at that time could be below or above 50k but in any case that’s a drop in the sea in their entire revenue model. With publicly available reports of bookie revenues going over half a billion per year, no bookie in their right mind would pay such a thing. They would and could always endure the loss on web, as most have telebetting and shops business as well, both having higher profit margin then web.
Lay off kids. All you do is get your self few days of curses from web developers and network admins. But no juice.