Early Tuesday, another cyber attack caused a famous crypto exchange Bitfinex to shut down temporarily. The website had to struggle for about two hours after the DDoS attack, after which it successfully resumed its operations. The site shows a timeline of incidences on its incidents page.
Bitfinex Operations ‘Back To Normal’ After the Cyberattack
On Tuesday morning, Bitfinex services halted for about an hour or two when it was struck by a cyber attack. Reportedly, the cyber attack was identified as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS takes place when several virus-infected or compromised servers attack a system, making it unable to function appropriately.
The officials were quick to inform their users about the problem through a tweet.
https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/1003997834784493569
The attack apparently occurred after it resumed the services after ‘unplanned maintenance’. After struggling for an hour, another tweet informed the users about the services returning to normal.
https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/1004015269646356481
Though they just gave one-liner information via their tweet, they explained the details about the DDoS attack on their website incidents page. After struggling for another hour and fifteen minutes, they finally updated their status page stating ‘The platform is back to normal operations’.
Bitfinex Spokesperson Confirms The Attack Only Affected ‘Trading Operations’
After the incident, a spokesperson from Bitfinex confirmed that the attack only affected the operations of the crypto exchange and that nothing was at risk during the assault.
“The attack only impacted trading operations, and user accounts and their associated funds/account balances weren’t at risk at any point.”Though the statement somewhat satisfies most traders, the cyber attack caused a drop of 2% in Bitcoin trade value to approx. $7,400. This was rather upsetting for some traders as evident via their angry tweets.
https://twitter.com/vivekmessikumar/status/1003999560660709376
Bitfinex, the Hong Kong-based crypto exchange, is presently the fourth largest crypto exchange in the world. Ironically, this isn’t the first time that this giant crypto exchange faced a hack. It also faced similar situations in June 2017 and August 2016.
However, the present attack may appear as a continuation of the trail of crypto hacks. Not much time has passed since we reported about the cyber attack on Taylor, a startup app designed to link cryptocurrency exchanges with mobile technology.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://latesthackingnews.com/2018/06/06/bitfinex-resumes-operations-after-facing-ddos-cyberattack/