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Top Cryptocurrency Exchanges hit by DDoS Attacks
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges often suffer
from an increased amount of internet traffic. In most cases, this indicates a spectacular growth among users looking to buy and sell cryptocurrencies across the platform. However, a lot of companies also suffer from DDoS attacks, or that is what they claim, at least. Below are some exchanges who suffered from recent DDoS attacks.
The past year and a half have been filled with quite a few roadblocks for the Bitfinex exchange. The company was hacked and saw over the US$70m worth of Bitcoin getting stolen. Moreover, Bitfinex sometimes faces a DDoS attack which slows down services or makes the platform completely inaccessible. One of those attacks took place in February of 2017, and it caused issues for users for quite some time. Both the front-end and API access were all impacted by this “severe” attack.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have seen incredible growth in popularity over the years. This is especially true in India, where demand for Bitcoin continues to grow. In December of 2016, the Indian exchange platform was hit by a major DDoS attack, shutting down the website, mobile app, and API altogether. It took a few hours of work to get everything in order again, but services were resumed pretty quickly, all things considered.
One of the oldest Bitcoin exchanges is known as BTC-E. The popularity of this platform is not on par with most other trading platforms, but it is still often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. One week prior to the Coinsecure DDoS attack, BTC-E suffered from a similar fate. The website was inaccessible for quite some time, although the company successfully increased its DDoS mitigation countermeasures. Ever since that time, the platform has not been targeted again by the look of things.
Larger exchanges are more prone to attracting the wrong kind of people. Kraken, one of the world’s biggest exchanges, has seen its fair share of DDoS attacks over the years. One such attack took place about three weeks ago, forcing the site and API offline. Unfortunately, a lot of traders were affected by this outage, as margin orders were closed without users being able to make changes. Margin trading across centralized platforms is always a risk, though.
The service provided by Poloniex has degraded quite a bit these past few months. For some unknown reason, the platform is incapable of dealing with their alleged user growth. As a result, the available infrastructure gets flooded during times of heavy trading, and the company often blames this on “DDoS” attacks. Increased user growth and DDoS attacks are not the same things, yet it is evident Poloniex simply can’t keep up with traders. This string of “DDoS” attacks has caused quite a few issues for people who use the platform. Margin traders have lost a fair chunk of money these past few weeks. Moreover, it seems the company is struggling with deposit and withdrawal delays since a few weeks as well. It is unclear if this situation can improve, but for the company’s sake, we can only hope they pick up the pace a bit.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
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