Kiev University victim of an online craps promotional attack

Cyber-attacks on institutional websites are on the increase, and clearly the University of Kiev in Ukraine has just fallen victim. Its official website, which is supposed to provide information to students and researchers, now displays promotional content for casino games, including online craps. This intrusion illustrates a growing phenomenon: the exploitation of security loopholes on educational sites to distribute commercial or even fraudulent content.

A university transformed into a showcase for online craps

While browsing the official website of the University of Kiev (universityofkyiv.com), users discovered an unusual page entitled “Craps in UK 2025”. Far from the expected academic publications, this section seems to have been hacked to promote online casino gameswith a special focus on online craps, a very popular dice game!

This intrusion is part of a worrying trend, with hackers exploiting vulnerabilities on institutional sites to insert advertising content. The added pages are often optimized to appear in search engine results, thus diverting the notoriety of the target site to online craps operators, as the current example shows.

Institutional sites: prime targets for hackers

Universities and schools are particularly attractive targets for this type of cyber-attack. Their reputation and seniority give them a good ranking on search enginesThis makes them ideal platforms for hosting undesirable promotional content. What’s more, the IT infrastructures of these institutions are often vulnerable due to the generally very limited resources devoted to cyber-security, not to mention the fact that their systems are sometimes obsolete…

This type of hacking is generally based on injecting links or web pages directly into the site’s architecture. Hackers can exploit security holes left open by insufficient updates, vulnerable plugins or compromised administrator access. Once infiltrated, they discreetly insert their own content to promote third-party services, in this case online craps platformsas well as other gambling activities and dubious products.

The case of Kiev University is far from isolated. In recent months, several educational institutions have been victims of similar attacksThis phenomenon is likely to increase with the proliferation of illegal online casino platforms, which are constantly seeking to circumvent traditional advertising regulations.

To curb this threat, universities must strengthen their cyber security by updating their infrastructures, actively monitoring the content published on their sites and making their IT teams aware of these new forms of piracy. In this sense, constant updating of CMS and plugins, the implementation of intrusion detection systems and limiting administrative access to only the necessary users seem to be required.