Live-stream of GAA county final sabotaged by cyber attack

Tyrone’s ill-fated live streaming of the county’s Senior Football Championship final was sabotaged by cyber-attackers, it has emerged.

Viewers worldwide who paid to watch the clash of Trillick and Errigal Ciaran on October 13 were left frustrated by a sudden black-out in the second half, and efforts to restore coverage failed.

The problem was traced to a failure of the Content Delivery Network (CDN), and all subscribers received a full refund.

But Tyrone official Gerard Bradley has claimed the showpiece occasion was the target of a cyber-attack

“The Content Delivery Network company has reported that there was a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the data centre hosting the service,” he said.

Bradley, who heads up the county board’s Information Technology Committee, explained that a DDoS attack is a type of cyber-attack that uses compromised computers and devices to send data or request data from a targeted server.

“The purpose of these requests is to slow down and eventually crash the targeted server. There are multiple reasons for these types of cyber-attack,” he says in his report to next week’s annual convention.

Although Tyrone GAA was not responsible for the failure of the live stream, we decided to refund all subscribers and this process was completed within 48 hours.

The CDN company has confirmed that a new server will be dedicated to Tyrone’s streaming service for the future, and support staff will be in place at critical times.

Bradley stresses that all other live-streamed matches in the county over the past two seasons have been delivered successfully and without interruption.

“Over the last two years, we have provided live streaming for 14 matches, and this is the first time we have experienced such a malfunction.

“DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common, and in the weeks following the county final, DDoS attacks recently targeted Amazon’s S3 cloud service and a major political party involved in an election.

“We have apologised to all our subscribers and are particularly disappointed for those subscribers who have emigrated and were relying on us to receive the live stream from this match.”