When a flood hits your casino: practical DDoS protection and scaling for gaming platforms
Hold on — if your site goes dark during a promotion or a progressive hit, you lose more than uptime. You lose trust, revenue, and player data momentum. In plain terms: prepare now, or accept long, expensive recovery later.
This guide gives you an actionable defence plan for small to mid-size online casinos: capacity planning, realistic mitigation steps, tooling choices, and scripts for incident response. Read it and you’ll be able to map a 30–90 day program that materially reduces DDoS risk while keeping latency acceptable for pokies and live-style flows.
Quick summary — the three blunt truths
Wow — the three essentials you must accept before designing anything:
- Attacks are inevitable: someone, someday, will test your edges.
- Layered protection wins: combine edge filtering, rate limits, and scrubbing.
- People matter: an up-to-date runbook plus a named incident lead saves days of confusion.
How attacks hit casino platforms (short, real-world mechanics)
My gut says most operators underestimate stateful vs stateless load. Stateless floods (UDP, SYN) saturate bandwidth quickly. Stateful floods (HTTP, TLS) chew CPU, memory and session tables.
On the one hand, a 10 Gbps UDP attack simply exhausts upstream link capacity; on the other, a targeted HTTP/2 attack at 200k RPS can grind your application servers even if bandwidth is fine. The mitigation for each differs—so detection must identify attack type in seconds, not minutes.
Baseline architecture you should aim for
Here’s a practical stack that balances cost, latency and resilience:
- Global CDN/edge (for static assets, caching and basic filtering).
- Cloud-based DDoS scrubbing provider (on-demand scrubbing or always-on, depending on risk).
- Elastic application tier behind autoscaling groups and load balancers.
- Rate-limiting and WAF rules close to the edge.
- Dedicated game servers on segmented networks with stricter ingress rules.
- Out-of-band control plane and dashboards (so you can operate if primary UI is overloaded).
Comparison table — protection options at a glance
| Option | Protection Level | Latency Impact | Typical Cost | Best For | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN + basic WAF | Low–Medium | Low | Low–Medium | Static assets, caching | Essential baseline; blocks simple HTTP floods and bots. |
| Cloud DDoS scrubbing (on-demand) | Medium–High | Low–Medium | Medium | Most SMB casinos | Good for burst attacks; activation latency matters (minutes). |
| Always-on scrubbing (provider POPs) | High | Medium | High | High-risk, high-traffic sites | Best for continuous protection; costlier but lower failover latency. |
| On-prem appliances + ISP mitigation | Medium | Low | Medium–High CAPEX | Enterprises with direct control | Good for protocol-layer protection; limited by upstream bandwidth. |
| Hybrid (provider + on-prem) | Very High | Low–Medium | High | Large operators | Combines low-latency edge with large-scale scrubbing capacity. |
Mini-cases — two short examples
Case A: A boutique RTG-powered room running 10k concurrent players. During a new-tournament push, they experienced a 5 Gbps UDP flood. ISP filtering mitigated most bandwidth noise within 20 minutes; but application session tables still crashed because stateful protections were missing. Lesson: pair bandwidth filtering with session table protection and autoscaling.
Case B: A midsize operator had a 120 Gbps mixed attack (SYN + HTTP). Always-on scrubbing redirected traffic to provider POPs in under 2 minutes; however TLS handshakes spiked CPU on the origin because the origin terminated TLS. Moving TLS termination to the scrubbing/CDN layer and enabling TLS session caching reduced CPU by 75% and recovered live dealer streams within 10 minutes. The recovery time difference paid for the scrubbing subscription within a month of prevented downtime.
Detection & telemetry — what you must collect
Short observation: nothing you don’t monitor will improve. Seriously.
Collect these at minimum:
- Network flow logs (NetFlow/sFlow) from edge routers.
- Per-instance CPU/mem and socket usage.
- Application-layer request patterns (RPS, unique IPs, user agents).
- Latency percentiles for critical paths (login, bet placement, cashout).
Analyse with tools that can correlate spikes across layers — network, infra, app. Use rolling baselines (7–14 days) so you detect anomalies instead of seasonal peaks (e.g., Friday promo spikes).
Mitigation playbook — step-by-step (operational)
Alright, check this out — your runbook should be no longer than a page and follow this checklist:
- Detect: automated alert when bandwidth > 1.5× baseline and RPS anomalies exceed thresholds.
- Identify: classify protocol (UDP/TCP/HTTP), top source ASNs, and geos.
- Engage: notify ISP and scrubbing provider — pre-authorised contacts and API keys on hand.
- Redirect: BGP failover to scrubbing or enable CDN “under attack” mode.
- Mitigate: apply rate limits, challenge (CAPTCHA), block ASN/subnet if clearly malicious.
- Recover: gradually reintroduce routes, monitor retransmission and error rates.
- Post-incident: collect packet captures and timeline; update signatures and rules.
Where to put the link (platform guidance)
When choosing partners and platform features, balance mitigation and player experience — for example, place TLS termination at the edge and avoid re-routing every small spike to origin. A pragmatic resource with platform examples and access details for an integrated gaming experience is the main page, which shows common integration patterns used by gaming sites that balance CDN, caching and session persistence.
Implementation roadmap — 30/60/90 day plan
Short pulse: start simple, then refine.
- Days 0–30: Baseline metrics (7–14 day rolling), implement CDN for static content, enable basic WAF rules, create one-page runbook.
- Days 31–60: Add cloud scrubbing provider on standby (API-tested), configure rate-limits for login and bet endpoints, enable TLS offload at edge.
- Days 61–90: Formalize BGP failover with scrubbing, perform tabletop DR & runbook drill, test capacity with controlled traffic bursts, tune WAF signatures and CAPTCHA thresholds.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- Over-reliance on origin autoscaling — autoscaling reacts slowly to network saturation. Avoid by protecting bandwidth at the edge.
- Terminating TLS at origin — move TLS to the CDN/scrubbing layer to reduce CPU load on game servers.
- Absent runbooks — craft a one-page incident checklist and test it quarterly.
- Blindly blocking countries — this hurts real players; use a risk-based approach and temporary measures tied to telemetry.
- Neglecting stateful protections — apply SYN cookies, increase TCP backlog correctly and harden session stores.
Mini-FAQ
Q: How fast should I detect and respond?
A: Observe spikes within 60–120 seconds and begin mitigation within 5–10 minutes for larger attacks. Faster detection reduces SLA damage; automation helps (API-driven scrubbing).
Q: Do I need always-on scrubbing?
A: Not always. If you face regular large attacks or serve high-value progressive jackpots, always-on is justified. Otherwise, keep on-demand scrubbing with a tested failover plan to balance cost and protection.
Q: Will DDoS protection affect latency for players?
A: Minimal if configured correctly. CDN edge caching and TLS offload lower origin latency. Always run latency tests (p99) after configuration changes and during peak hours.
Q: What about encryption and player privacy?
A: Keep end-to-end encryption standards. If you terminate TLS at a scrubbing provider, ensure contractual and technical safeguards for handling PII and KYC docs, and that KYC data is never exposed in raw logs.
Quick Checklist (print-and-stick)
- Baseline traffic and RPS dashboards — live.
- CDN + WAF deployed for static & app entry points.
- Scrubbing provider contract & API keys validated.
- One-page DDoS runbook with named contacts.
- TLS termination strategy defined (edge vs origin).
- Rate-limit rules for login, bet/cashout, and API endpoints.
- Quarterly incident drills scheduled.
Regulatory & player-safety notes (AU-aware)
To be frank, your platform must respect KYC/AML rules and protect personal data. For Australian players, ensure any third-party scrubbing or CDN that terminates TLS is contractually bound to data protection standards; be explicit in your privacy policy about where KYC documents are stored and processed. Also display 18+ messaging on affected pages during incidents and provide links to local support services where appropriate.
18+ | Play responsibly. If gambling is causing you harm, seek local help (e.g., Lifeline in Australia: 13 11 14). This article focuses on infrastructure protection, not responsible play advice.
Post-incident actions & continuous improvement
After any significant event, complete a post-mortem within 72 hours. Include packet captures, timelines, decisions taken, and measurable outcomes (time to detect, time to mitigate, player drop-off, revenue loss). Then integrate lessons into runbooks and tune detection thresholds. Keep a small “lessons backlog” that the engineering manager prioritises — even minor fixes reduce future load.
Sources
- https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/what-is-a-ddos-attack/
- https://aws.amazon.com/shield/
- https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-61r2.pdf
About the Author
{author_name}, iGaming expert. I’ve designed resilience plans for small and mid-tier casino platforms, handled tabletop drills and actual incidents, and trained ops teams on rapid DDoS response. I write from practical, hands-on experience and aim to keep the advice directly implementable.