Betfair Raises The Odds Against Web Attacks

The internet has created a profitable marketplace for bricks and mortar retailers and spurred many new ventures that would not exist in the physical world.

One such company is online gaming firm Betfair, which handled one billion bets in 2005 and claims to process twice as many credit and debit card transactions as any other European web site.

But with the growth of ecommerce has come an influx of criminals looking to get rich through exploiting the internet.

"Criminals will be interested in any place on the internet where there's a lot of money," says Rorie Devine, IS director at Betfair. "That's why one of my core challenges is security. It is not something we just pay lip-service to; we put a lot of time and money into it."

To tackle this challenge the internet betting exchange has recruited a team of security specialists to monitor and respond to hacking attempts and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.