10Bet, NetBet, MansionBet, Sport Nation & Other SBTech Sites Down After Major Ransomware Attack
If you have been trying to login to sites such as 10Bet, MansionBet, NetBet, Sport Nation and similar sites since the 28th March 2020 you will have noticed they are all showing ‘under maintenance’ notices.
All of these brands run on a third-party platform from a sportbook provider called SBTech. They are one of the biggest platform providers for sports betting sites and they run the interface, markets, odds and features for over a dozen brands in the UK.
SBTech confirmed on Tuesday that they had been the subject of a ransomware attack against EU and US data centers. Collectively between their brands millions of customers internationally have not been able to access their betting accounts for over 4 days now.
What Is The Outage & When Will The Sites Be Live Again?
Initially it was reported the outage was down to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, however if that was the case it should have been fixed within a day or so. SBTech confirmed on the 31st March, 72 hours after they were taken down, that they had been targeted by a ransomware attack.
The statement from SBTech is as follows:
On Saturday, 28 March 2020, we suffered a breach of our security systems that resulted in an unknown 3rd party gaining unauthorised access to our datacenters in EU and US.
The 3rd party successfully encrypted data hosted on servers within each datacenter, preventing our ability to access and use that data to operate our business. Upon identifying the incident, we suspended access to all sites which are served by our platform.
We have engaged with 3rd party cyber security experts and law enforcement agencies who are assisting us in conducting an urgent investigation and we have no reason to believe that the personal data of any end users of our customers has been extracted from our databases
Given the fact many people are also working from home due to coronavirus isolation rules it could further elongate the time needed to sort the issues.
As soon as we have an update from SBTech brands as to when they will be live again we will update this page to give you more information. It is hoped this will be on or before Wednesday 1st April.
Is Your Money Safe? Can You Withdraw?
Yes, your funds are all safe as these are held in separate accounts under the UKGC deposit protection scheme, there is also no issues with the brands themselves, simply the technology provider that powers them.
SBTech have also confirmed that they believe no personal data or banking information has been compromised in the ransomware attack, although it could be wise to keep an eye on any bank accounts linked to their betting sites just in case.
You of course cannot deposit or bet while these sites are in maintenance mode but if you have funds you need to withdraw desperately you could try to contact customer support at the relevant site who may be able to issue you a manual withdrawal.
What Will This Cost The Brands?
Customers will obviously be annoyed at not being allowed access to their accounts for such a long period of time, however, the brands themselves will likely be fuming.
Yes at this time due to the coronavirus induced sports shutdown there is not at lot of sports betting activity going on at the moment but that doesn’t mean people are not playing casino games, betting on virtual sports or other sports still happening; such as eSports. These sites also operate in other countries, not just the UK, and so this is having a wide affect.
10Bet and other big SBTech brands could stand to lose a lot of money with the length of this outage, not just from bets they cannot take at this time but from punters that might now migrate to other non-SBTech sites that are still running without issues. They will likely claim a lot of lost revenue back from SBTech themselves but this is not going to cover reputational damage, the extent of which is unknown and will continue to get worse the longer the sites are down.
What Is SBTech?
It is an expensive and labourious process to build your own sportsbook and so many of the newer sites that have cropped up in the last decade use third party providers such as SBTech. This allows brands to streamline their operations requiring less resources and staff.
SBTech provide the interface (which is why the sites look alike), features (e.g. in-play, cash out, etc) and other aspects that firms can opt-into, such as; payment processing, odds feeds, games licenses, etc.
SBTech are actually regarded as the best platform for sports and the brands that use them tend to be bigger and more established compared to other providers such as FSB Technology and BetConstruct.
The problem with a system like this, as highlighted here, is if the provider has an outage it takes down all the sites that run their product.
