A massive distributed denial of service or DDoS zeroed in on a Solana-based lifestyle app that encourages users to “move-to-earn” STEPN, this weekend. Notifying the same via Twitter, the platform announced that once recovery is complete, updates would be announced soon.
In the series of tweets, the platform urged users to pause during the maintenance or “otherwise the work-outs may not be recorded properly,” it read.
It also assured users that the developers are working on the application to resume their services after the attacks.
Just a few days back, the popular move-to-earn app unveiled a new ANTI-CHEAT mechanism to combat fraud. The gaming app, which recently announced it would remove GPS support in China, had to be taken into maintenance for several hours to implement the change.
Unfortunately, some users were mistaken to be bots via the new system due to the DDoS attack on the server.
The application is reportedly back online as “data transfers have reopened and… also improved the rules and formulated processing and identification rules.” The report also stressed the need for an anti-cheating update, stating,
The anti-cheating update may seem small, but it is actually an important cornerstone of STEPN’s long-term development.
How did the token fare?
As reported by TronWeekly, the app that was conceived in 2021, saw its native token GMT’s market cap reach nearly $860 million, as of May 22. Following the latest onslaught, GMT was down by over 6% in a few hours. At press time it is trading at $0.157, a marginal increase of 4%.
Biggest-Ever DDoS Attack To Hit A Decentralized Platform
DDoS is a cyber-attack in which a perpetrator aims to make a network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting the services of a host connected to a network.
One of the most powerful distributed denials of service attacks ever recorded was on the content-delivery network Cloudflare in April 2022. The incident raised significant attention because it was delivered through 15.3 million HTTP requests, one of the largest in scale.
Because HTTPS requests are much more compute-intensive, it highlighted the attackers’ capability to put much more strain on the target.