The digital asset management platform, Bitrue suffered a distributed denial-of-service [DDoS] attack on 20th September. This led to the web services on the platform being unavailable. Bitrue further revealed that a few app functions that rely on web services were also affected.
Its official tweet read,
All Bitrue functions should now be working correctly. There are no lasting effects of this attack and all user funds are safe. If you continue to have any issues, please send us a DM or contact us at [email protected]
— Bitrue (@BitrueOfficial) September 21, 2020
The platform also revealed that there were “no lasting effects” of the attack and confirmed that all the funds were safe.
Additionally, in February this year, OKEx and Bitfinex suffered multiple sophisticated assaults of DDoS attacks. The first attack on OKEx routed nearly 200 gigabytes per second of traffic. In less than 24-hours another denial attack followed, this time on Bitfinex, which put a strain on the platform’s activity. During the same OKEx was hit with a second attack by the bad actors routing 400 gigabytes per second of traffic.
Cryptocurrency exchanges weren’t the only targets of DDoS attacks. Nearly a month ago, the New Zealand stock exchange was hit by a DDoS attack which led to a series of outages as a result of targeted disruption by cybercriminals who demanded Bitcoin in order to cease the attack.
A quick primer:
DDoS attack is a method of disruption on the Internet and does not require much sophistication or effort. By overloading a target with bogus traffic, a malicious actor is able to make a website or service unavailable. One of the many reasons as to why this is done could potentially be for the purpose of suspending trading in order to achieve some kind of pricing advantage.
Upon analyzing some of the DDoS attacks hitting the many cryptocurrency exchanges on CloudFlare network in order to gauge any visible patterns of interest, the eb-infrastructure and website-security company found that the prominent volume of DDoS traffic originated from SSDP amplification attacks, NTP amplification attacks, and application-layer attacks.
While most cryptocurrency exchanges have been able to recover from the impact of a Distributed Denial of Service attacks within a single day, however, with trading coming to a complete halt due to it essentially implies that a long-lasting DDoS attack could severely affect the revenues of the platform.