It has been quite a tough past few weeks for Bitfinex. The exchange has suffered a lot of negative press around its involvement with Tether. This came on the heels of Bitfinex officially exiting the US market because of the termination of their banking licences.
There were also complaints by a number of clients who suffered losses as a result of a flash crash on a number of alt coins.
Now, it seems as if they are also facing the heat from online attackers. On the 12th of December, Bitfinex was hit by a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.
This attack was so large that it took down most of the services on Bitfinex. This, of course, did not happen at the best time as traders were trying to take advantage of large price swings.
They Even hit the API
What is no doubt clear is how large the attack actually was. In a tweet issued by Bitfinex to update on the attack, they claimed that the attack had also taken down their Application Programming Interface (API).
We are currently under heavy DDOS. API is also down. We are working on further mitigation.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) December 12, 2017
Apart from seding a large number of requests on the platform, the attackers were also able to immobolize the exchange by creating hundreds of thousands of “fake accounts” which clogged up the system for new clients.
In order to lessen the effect of these, Bitfinex had to temporarily disable new account creation capability.
Bitfinex has been suffering from a range of DDOS attacks this month already. Just last week on the 7th of December, they released the following tweet that covered the extent of the attacks that occured over the week.
Bitfinex has been under significant denial-of-service attack for the past several days. The attack has recently worsened. Please monitor https://t.co/u3pYCWdhHY for ongoing updates.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) December 7, 2017
Who is to Blame?
While many may think that cyber criminals may be the perpetrators behind this attack, this is less than likely. Given that the attack was attempting to bring down Bitfinex's trading platform, it could have been perpetrated by a competitor.
Bitfinex is known as one of the largest online cryptocurrency trading platforms. It would therefore make sense for competitors who wanted to bring down the Exchange.
There are also some who will claim that it may be a result of nefarious actions by those in the company. There were similar accusations that were raised when Bitfinex suffered a $71m hack last year. This was the hack that of course caused the issues with Tether.
Featured Image via Fotolia
