Over the July 4th holiday weekend, an Internet hacker decided to attack four online casinos in the state of New Jersey. The attack occurred for only 30 minutes but shut down the four sites and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin or an even worse attack would take place.

The Director of the Gaming Enforcement Division in New Jersey, David Rebuck, has released information on the recent attack earlier this week. The attack took place on Thursday and is considered a distributed denial of service attack. A DDOS attack is one in which a website is flooded with data with requests for access which will leave the site unable to operate.

Rebuck stated that the short attack was followed by a larger threat by the attacker. The hacker threatened to attack again in a 24 hour time frame if a ransom of Bitcoin was not paid. The follow-up attack was to attack casinos in New Jersey as well as businesses located in Atlantic City which use the same provider for Internet service.

The ransom was never paid and with the help of casino staff members and law enforcement, the threat was mitigated without a major disruption of service. Every casino involved remained on high alert over the holiday weekend. The weekend then passed by without further incident.

The sites affected have not been named nor the amount of ransom the attacker wanted to be paid by Atlantic City officials. The case is still under investigation by agencies of law enforcement with local and state officials involved. Player monies remained safe during the attack with no personal information being compromised.