Major Crypto Exchanges Bitfinex and OKEx Hit by Service Denial Attacks

Two high cryptocurrency exchanges have reported distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults on their programs within the final 24 hours.

OKEx, which says it’s primarily based in Malta, has apparently suffered two assaults, one Thursday and one right now, in accordance with its CEO, Jay Hao. On his Weibo account Friday, Hao mentioned the primary assault was of a 200 gigabyte severity, however the second had doubled to 400 GB.

Regardless of the assaults, the trade’s service is “largely unaffected,” he mentioned. OKEx’s Twitter account has no warnings of interruptions this morning, other than a short interlude for a systems upgrade for its futures and choices buying and selling facility.

Apparently extra severely affected is Bitfinex, which reported a suspected DDoS assault on Twitter Friday morning (UTC time).

The Hong Kong-headquartered platform’s buying and selling providers have been offline for a interval of below an hour, however at press time Bitfinex says providers are again to regular.

“Right now we have been topic to a really subtle DDoS assault,” tweeted Bitfinex CTO Paulo Ardoino after the occasion. “The complete @bitfinex staff labored actually exhausting to fully annihilate it in a brief time period. All funds remained protected throughout the entire assault and high-trading-performance is now absolutely re-established.”

A DDoS assault makes an attempt to overwhelm the internet hosting servers of a web based service, utilizing a flood of faux site visitors from a number of computer systems to disrupt regular exercise. A extreme assault can take a service offline, or could trigger gradual responses for web site customers.

It isn’t clear why two main exchanges have been focused on this manner at roughly the identical time, or what the attackers hope to realize.