On December 12, 2017, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex announced its servers were under a series of massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. On December 17th however, the company said its platform is suffering a “heavy DDoS” attack once again.
In a tweet on Sunday afternoon, Bitfinex said that “Platform is currently under heavy DDOS, we are working to bring it back online.”
Platform is currently under heavy DDOS, we are working to bring it back online.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) December 17, 2017
While no further information has been provided by Bitfinex its customers are not happy with the situation and sharing their anger on Twitter, while there are some customers who are questioning whether Bitfinex is really under attack or the increasing price of Bitcoin has something to do with it.
“you can’t seriously believe that bitfinex is under DDoS attack, right?
Everytime BTC is going up they have some problems,” tweeted Denis Mehmedov.
you can’t seriously believe that bitfinex is under ddos attack,right ?
Everytime BTC is going up they have some problems…— Denis mehmedov (@BlooDh3xx) December 17, 2017
After following the timeline of DDoS attacks against Bitfinex in December, it was revealed that the company first suffered the attack on December 4th which continued till December 7th. On December 12th attacks reemerged and continued for hours before mitigated by Bitfinex. In the latest case, the Bitfinex status page shows that all its services are operating normally.
Bitfinex status page
A DDoS attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. Therefore, Bitfinex customers have all the right to express anger over service outage especially when Bitcoin’s price is setting new records every day.
However, the good news is that DDoS attacks cannot allow attackers to steal your funds, unlike recent security breaches in which seven cryptocurrency platforms lost millions of dollars in a snap.
If you are a cryptocurrency investor, we have compiled a list of 5 Safest Bitcoin Wallets for you. If you are running a business; calculate the cost and probability of a DDoS attack on your business with this DDoS Downtime Cost Calculator.
