The Largest DDoS Attack of 2025 Hit an Online Betting Site With 1Tbps. Shocked? You Shouldn't Be.

Written By Noel Bradford
A 1Tbps DDoS attack just crushed an online betting site. In true 2025 fashion, it caught the industry flat-footed. Here's why DDoS attacks are still such a massive, predictable mess.

In the latest episode of "The Internet Is a Dumpster Fire," an online betting company just got absolutely flattened by a 1Tbps Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. According to TechRadar, the poor souls running this site were on the receiving end of an absolutely biblical wall of junk traffic, rendering them about as useful as a chocolate teapot for hours.

Now, hold onto your hats — because here's the real kicker: people are acting surprised.

1Tbps of Traffic — It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

First off, if you're in the online gambling business — AKA "organised hope management" — you should be expecting to get battered like cod in a seaside chippy every single day. Betting websites are high value, highly sensitive to downtime (every second offline is lost money), and absolutely hated by large swathes of the internet.

Yet here we are in 2025, and companies are still treating DDoS mitigation like an optional extra. "Oh, we'll get around to that after we finish our new player referral bonus!" Bloody brilliant. Might want to add "Spend half your revenue on downtime" to the list of features, too.

Brute Force: Because Why Bother Being Clever?

What's fascinating about this attack is that it wasn't some elaborate, multi-stage masterpiece of cybercrime. It was brute force. A giant digital boot to the face. A one trillion bits-per-second flood of crap that says: "Nice server, would be a shame if someone... parked a tidal wave on it."

Think about that: no clever tricks. No supply chain backdoors. No sneaky malware. Just raw, stupid power — and it worked. Which says a hell of a lot more about the state of basic security than it does about hacker sophistication.

Have We Learned Absolutely Fuck-All?

Remember when GitHub got nailed with a 1.3Tbps attack back in 2018? Or when AWS had to fend off a 2.3Tbps whopper in 2020? You'd think those headline-grabbing catastrophes would've prompted some "lightbulb moments" in boardrooms. Maybe someone should have thought, "Hey, maybe we should invest in proper DDoS mitigation!" or "Maybe we shouldn't host mission-critical services behind a consumer-grade firewall and a prayer!" or even "Maybe we should pretend to give a shit about resilience!"

Nope. Eight years later and some companies are still apparently betting their entire online existence on pure hope. Spoiler alert: hope is not a strategy.

Betting Firms Are Juicy Targets, But Not Special Snowflakes

Sure, gambling sites have big, flashing neon targets on their backs, but let's be real — everyone is a target now. It doesn't matter whether you're running a crypto exchange, a shoe store, or a knitting forum. If you exist online, someone out there would love to drown you in packets just for a laugh.

You can't stay off the radar. You can't be too small to matter. And you definitely can't just trust your hosting provider to deal with it unless you're paying for proper protection. You either have DDoS protection or you don't. You either take it seriously or you get flattened. There's no middle ground.

Where the Hell Are the ISPs?

You know who else needs to have a word with themselves? Internet Service Providers.

DDoS attacks don't materialise from thin air. They are enabled by compromised devices (hello, unpatched IoT rubbish), poorly secured networks, and the lack of proper upstream filtering.

Yet ISPs continue to treat network-level filtering like it's some dark sorcery from "Harry Potter and the Techniques We Can't Be Arsed to Implement." If ISPs had any real incentive to proactively null-route DDoS traffic instead of playing dumb, these brute-force attacks wouldn't even reach their targets.

But no — why bother fixing the plumbing when you can just let the sewage flow freely downstream and bill customers for "enhanced" protection?

How Much Will This Cost Them?

Short answer: a fuckload.

Every minute of downtime for an online betting site is pure pain. Lost bets, lost customers, refund demands, potential regulatory fines... not to mention the sheer reputational damage. Gamblers are loyal right up until the moment a site doesn't work, at which point they move to the next site faster than you can say "all bets are off."

If this organisation wasn't properly insured (and let's be honest, they probably weren't), this could get spectacularly expensive. And if their incident response plan amounted to "turn it off and back on again," then they're truly stuffed.

What Should They Have Done?

Oh, let me count the ways. DDoS protection should've been baked in from Day One. Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS Shield, Radware — pick one, pay for it, and use it. Real-time traffic monitoring should be as standard as having a front door lock. Any halfway decent platform should have automatic traffic scrubbing in place. Geo-distributed load balancing, multi-cloud redundancy, and actual, tested incident response plans should have been ready before they were drowning in SYN packets.

You wouldn't open a casino without security guards. Why in God's name would you open a digital casino without the digital equivalent?

A Final Word to the Wise (and the Wilfully Ignorant)

If you’re running any online business in 2025 and you’re not actively investing in DDoS mitigation, infrastructure redundancy, and 24/7 threat monitoring, then you're not saving money. You're just racking up debt that will come due the moment some teenager with access to a botnet decides to have a giggle at your expense.

DDoS attacks aren't new. They're not surprising. They're not even clever. They are, in 2025, basic background radiation of the internet. Ignoring them is about as wise as licking a live wire and hoping you don't get fried.

And if your business plan relies on "it probably won't happen to us," then congratulations: you’re not just gambling — you're practically begging the universe to fuck you sideways with a cactus.

Noel Bradford

Noel Bradford – Head of Technology at Equate Group, Professional Bullshit Detector, and Full-Time IT Cynic

As Head of Technology at Equate Group, my job description is technically “keeping the lights on,” but in reality, it’s more like “stopping people from setting their own house on fire.” With over 40 years in tech, I’ve seen every IT horror story imaginable—most of them self-inflicted by people who think cybersecurity is just installing antivirus and praying to Saint Norton.

I specialise in cybersecurity for UK businesses, which usually means explaining the difference between ‘MFA’ and ‘WTF’ to directors who still write their passwords on Post-it notes. On Tuesdays, I also help further education colleges navigate Cyber Essentials certification, a process so unnecessarily painful it makes root canal surgery look fun.

My natural habitat? Server rooms held together with zip ties and misplaced optimism, where every cable run is a “temporary fix” from 2012. My mortal enemies? Unmanaged switches, backups that only exist in someone’s imagination, and users who think clicking “Enable Macros” is just fine because it makes the spreadsheet work.

I’m blunt, sarcastic, and genuinely allergic to bullshit. If you want gentle hand-holding and reassuring corporate waffle, you’re in the wrong place. If you want someone who’ll fix your IT, tell you exactly why it broke, and throw in some unsolicited life advice, I’m your man.

Technology isn’t hard. People make it hard. And they make me drink.

https://noelbradford.com
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