Ministry of Health blocked thousands of accesses to online gambling sites

online gambling sites

All over the world, companies and organisations regulate their employees’
online access and block individual websites when necessary. This is also the
case in the UK, where the Department of Health and Social Care blocked more
than 4,000 such attempts last year. According to a report by the news on the official
site YOJU casino
, this includes 2,081 gambling accesses,
such as online sports betting and casinos. The authority handed this data over
to the newspaper after a request based on the Freedom of Information Act.

The massive increase in unauthorised access

The number mentioned corresponds to an increase of more than twenty times
compared to the previous year, when only 94 attempted accesses to online
casinos and the like were registered. The Metro report cites the Corona-related
lockdown and the related general increase in online gambling in the UK as a
possible reason.

Online sports betting providers accounted for the ministry’s most
significant share of dial-up attempts. In addition, 724 attempted web accesses
followed this to tools that anonymised browsing history. However, according to
the church, it was unclear how many of these had targeted the sites of gambling
providers.

However, online gambling was not the only target of employees surfing the
net without permission during their working hours. For example, 239 accesses to
websites contaminated with spyware and malware were prevented. Also, 135 pages
with pornographic content could have been blocked. In addition, the ministry’s
IT had blocked access to 186 sites with “distasteful” content and 126
sites with questionable or even illegal content. Twelve and seven online sites
were dealing with weapons and drugs, respectively.

The authorities were reluctant to give details about the departments that
were particularly affected by the accesses. The same applies whether they were
increasingly accessed via laptops or from the home office. There was also no
information on how many successful attempts were despite the installed blockade
of IT.

In a statement, the ministry said:

“We do not investigate who is behind the attempt as the person in question
is identified by the reporting system. We ensure that all current cases of
breaches of our Acceptable Use of IT policy are escalated through the
appropriate chain of command, even if the attempts are unsuccessful”.

But the Health and Social Services Department was not the only government
organisation where employees surfed the net far beyond the scope of their
duties, Metro said. According to the report, there were more than 8,000 similar
attempts in the Cabinet Office, which reports directly to the prime minister,
in 2021.

A good 10 % of the websites caught in the firewall had pornographic content.
However, the number of online gambling offers accessed was not broken down.

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