Service Interruption Update

Last night (Sunday 4 September) our DNS provider, Netnames, appears to have been compromised and as a result the Betfair.com site – along with a number of their other clients’ sites including telegraph,co.uk, the UPS site and Acer to name a few – was redirected to a third party site believed to have been set up by the hacker. Netnames rectified the situation but it takes some time for the changes to flow through.

It's important to note that the websites themselves have *not* been hacked.  Instead of managing to breach the website, the hackers have managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected. DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like Betfair.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered Betfair.com into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn't under the control of Betfair.

Because of the way that DNS works, it may take some time for corrected DNS entries for the affected websites to propagate worldwide - meaning there could be problems for some hours ahead.  The DNS provider (Netnames) continues to monitor last night’s incident closely and Betfair have no evidence to suggest that our customers have been put at risk. Thank you for your patience and understanding.