It may seem like cash has disappeared from the modern-day casino, replaced by chips and chits, but the value is still there – and it’s in more places than ever before. It’s not just in the slot machines and video poker machines – it’s also in the ATMs that now dot every casino. Losses due to ATM related fraud attacks were up 18 percent in the first half of 2015 when compared with the prior-year period, largely driven by an 18 percent rise in international skimming losses, with majority of such losses reported in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, according to the non-profit European ATM Security Team.
That’s one of the reasons Everi Holdings turned to Infoblox. Everi provides both gaming devices and ATMs to 90 percent of the casinos across the United States, including the entire Las Vegas Strip, as well as serving 1,100 gaming locations in 36 countries. You don’t have to be George Clooney and his merry band of thieves in Ocean’s Eleven to create a heist when it’s possible to silently extract money through the Internet.
“The attackers are getting smarter every day,” says T. J. Short, chief information security officer and vice president of infrastructure for Everi Holdings. “They’re getting new tools, new ideas, new concepts. So we have to have defenses that are leading edge, that can change, adapt, and update very quickly. Infoblox Internal DNS Security does that.”
Hackers have made more attempts to breach Everi’s networks over the past eight months than they have over the previous ten years, Short says. Hackers have targeted all of Everi’s client casinos, primarily with distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Domain Name System (DNS)-based attacks.
“There are three things that I can’t have,” says Short. “I can’t have downtime, I can’t have loss of revenue, and I can’t have loss of reputation. All three of those can potentially be caused by one attack—and we get hit about 10,000 times a day. So I have to rely on top solutions.”
To alleviate risk, Everi has deployed the Infoblox Internal DNS Security solution to disrupt advanced persistent threat (APT) and malware communication to hacker command-and-control servers by intercepting outgoing DNS queries to bad domains. It also deployed the Infoblox DNS Threat Analytics module to detect and automatically block exfiltration of sensitive data via DNS.
Everi uses the Infoblox Grid™ architecture to coordinate and synchronize data among all Infoblox appliances. When configurations change, the Grid Master automatically pushes out updates, and when new appliances are added to the Grid, the Grid Master automatically configures them and populates them with the data necessary for them to function.
That’s a big advantage for Everi. Short says, “I want to make sure that my network is secure, that it’s tight, that I have patches, that everything is up to date. I don’t have 50 to 100 people at any of my locations to do this. We’re talking handfuls of people who have to manage a multitude of tools. So the fact that Infoblox actually does automatic updates, the fact that it patches automatically, that it alerts you and tells you, ‘Hey, I found this and I updated it so it’s OK,’ makes my life a whole lot easier.”
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