Bitfinex Exchange Resumes Trading After DDoS Attack

Bitfinex announced that it has resumed its trading services after containing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday, June 5. The exchange first suffered issues with its trading engine which caused it to go offline briefly, and after fixing the issue, it was operational again. However, after less than an hour of activity, Bitfinex announced that it was experiencing a DDoS attack and that it was adjusting its protection measures to fend off the attackers. Happily, the attackers didn’t get away with any digital tokens or valuable information.

A Bad Day In The Office For Bitfinex

The world’s fourth-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, Bitfinex first reported on its status page that its platform was experiencing issues with the trading engine, but assured its users that the issue would be addressed shortly. Two hours later, the platform was back online, with Bitfinex disclosing that the cause of the outage had been a challenge with its infrastructure provider. While that at first seemed to be the end of it, the exchange announced fifty minutes later that it was under attack and that an investigation had been launched.

The cause of the outage has been identified. A DDoS attack was launched soon after we restarted operations. The previous outage was caused by issues with one of our infrastructure providers. While the platform was recovering, the attack caused extreme load on the servers. We are adjusting the DDoS protection measures to fend off the attack and be able to relaunch.

A DDoS attack is an attack that aims to bring down a website by overwhelming it with a massive amount of traffic. This makes it impossible for genuine visitors to access it. According to network security company Arbor Networks, over 2,000 such attacks are coordinated daily.

The attack was neutralized in three hours, and the exchange announced that it had resumed its operations. In an emailed statement to Bloomberg, the exchange’s head of marketing, Kasper Rasmussen, said that customer data was not at risk during the attack.

The exchange was offline for an hour following the DDoS attack; however, the exchange is back online now. The attack only impacted trading operations, and user accounts and their associated funds/account balances were not at risk at any point during the attack.

Of Crypto Exchanges And Attacks

Crypto exchanges have remained targets of malicious hackers ever since the Mt. Gox hack took place. Bitfinex has been a target in the past, having suffered yet another DDoS attack in 2016 in which it lost close to 120,000 bitcoins. The hackers stole the digital tokens from users’ accounts, which at the time amounted to over $72 million.

This year, the biggest heist targeted Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck. The January attack saw hackers make away with $500 million worth of XEM tokens in one of the largest heists ever in the crypto world. The hackers took advantage of lax security measures employed by the exchange which had it store XEM tokens in an online hot wallet while other tokens such as Bitcoin were stored in an offline cold wallet. The hack led to tighter regulatory requirements by the country’s Financial Services Authority which led to the closure of a number of exchanges. One of the biggest exchanges in the world, Binance, was also a victim of the new regulatory framework, and had to shift base to the island nation of Malta after it failed to secure the necessary licensing with the FSA.