Notorious crypto exchange Bitfinex had its services suspended for three hours May 5th in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack that flooded Bitfinex’s online operations and overwhelmed its site.
“The platform is under extreme load. We are investigating,” wrote Bitfinex on its website status page.
The DDoS attack was preceded by another outage at Bitfinex earlier on the same day in which operations were paused due to, “issues with one of our infrastructure providers.”
Trading and funding is currently paused whilst we undergo unplanned maintenance. All features likely to resume shortly. Apologies for the inconvenience.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018
The second attack followed closely on the heels of the first issue. “While the platform was recovering (from the first outtage), the (DDoS) attack caused extreme load on the servers,” the Bitfinex status page states.
The second outage was also confirmed on Twitter:
Bitfinex is currently under extreme load. We are investigating the issue and will keep you all up to date as we learn more.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018
Bitfinex users are perhaps especially antsy because of numerous claims that the exchange is on very thin ice for having issued hundreds of million of its so called “stable coin” Tether, a crypto the exchanges purports is backed 1-1 by bank holdings of USD.
Despite close to a year of public demands that they do so, Bitfinex has never furnished a credible audit of Tether.
A lawyer for the prolific researcher and persistent Bitfinex critic “Bitfinex’d,” recently warned Bitfinex that if they were ever connected to numerous threats his whistleblower client, they’d be held accountable in court.
About DDoS Attacks
According to the site Digital Attack Map, DDoS attacks are inittiated after hackers create networks of computers infected with malware sent through malicious emails. Infected computers can then be used together as “botnets” that point coordinated floods of info at important computer systems and websites.
Systems becomes overwhelmed by fake traffic and cease to function properly.
According to Digital Attack Map, some botnets involve thousands of hijacked computers, and “some attacks are so big they can max out a country’s international cable capacity.”
“Specialized online marketplaces exist to buy and sell botnets or individual DDoS attacks. Using these underground markets, anyone can pay a nominal fee to silence websites they disagree with or disrupt an organization’s online operations. A week-long DDoS attack, capable of taking a small organization offline can cost as little as $150.”