Most of the cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, have been doing well for some time now. Their increasing value has not only made crypto-investors happy but also presented cryptocurrency exchange and trading platforms as attractive targets to cyberattacks. Few of these platforms have faced sustained attacks during the week, causing temporary disruption of services.
According to reports, two popular cryptocurrency exchange platforms, Bitfinex and BTC-e found themselves targets of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, causing additional stress on their respective infrastructure. While Bitfinex managed to pull through the attack, without any significant affect to its users, BTC-e users found the platform down for some time on Monday. The DDoS attacks combined with increased trading activity tends to compound the problem further.
The rise in DDoS and hacking attempts during the cryptocurrency bull run has become a common trend, mainly because of two reasons. For starters, hackers managing to steal Bitcoin and altcoins when the market is at its peak allows them to score a much bigger payout. Similarly, temporary disruption of service by launching massive scale DDoS attacks on leading exchange platforms during busy times will help the perpetrators to manipulate the cryptocurrency market prices either in their favor or just with an intention of causing panic.
In the past couple of year, there have been numerous hacking attempts on various cryptocurrency exchanges, leading to losses in turn of millions of dollars. Learning from the past mistakes, many exchanges have upgraded their security to prevent such incidents from reoccurring. The blockchain products lead at ARK Investments, Chris Burniske was not surprised by the increased instances of cyberattacks. He was further quoted in a publication saying,
“ There’s a big difference between a denial of service attack and a hack that causes clients to lose funds. As of yet, we’re fortunately not seeing any of the latter.”
Since Bitcoin commenced its bull run, many platforms have faced issues due to increased traffic, as they were mostly unprepared for such a scenario. But they have made necessary improvements to sustain heavy trade volumes, which might have also contributed towards better handling of the DDoS attacks, without causing service disruption.
Ref: CNBC | Image: NewsBTC
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