This Is How Bitcoin Exchanges Will Be Affected By The DDOS Attacks

The threat of DDoS attacks is a big worry for cryptocurrency exchanges, especially for Bitcoin, who has seen its price continue to soar, recently hitting a new high of $12,000. More and more people are trying to get their hands on this lucrative cryptocurrency whilst the price is so good, which has put an awful lot of strain on both the exchanges and the servers. They are doing everything they can to meet the growing needs of all of their customers, as well as doing their best to keep the hackers out of the exchanges, whose aim is to cripple the services that they offer, and find other ways to steal Bitcoin. The most common and feared attack is a DDoS attack. To put it simply, a DDoS is a distributed denial of service attack, which means that it is a cyber attack that looks to disrupt the service. It is normally done by flooding the server with too many requests that they simply cannot handle. They use multiple sources in order to attack the server, which can make them difficult to stop. In reality, the timing of this threat could not be worse. This is because Bitcoin has seen the biggest demand for the currency, which has caused havoc on exchanges all throughout the world. Systems were upgraded in an attempt to handle the increased traffic, which was caused by frantic trading and new users, as Bitcoin was approaching the $11,000 milestone. During this time, two exchanges also had to deal with cyber attacks. One of these exchanges was Bitfinex, which had scheduled a server maintenance, and were then hit by a DDoS attack at the same time. This attack is still ongoing. It was also reported that Bittrex had also detected a DDoS attack on their system as well. They have since confirmed this and apologised for any inconvenience that it caused. To a certain extent, these attacks should, and can be expected. Banking systems, online shopping platforms and other services are usual targets of such attacks and happen often, normally at a time where most damage can be caused. Back in late October, Bitcoin Gold was hit by a huge DDoS attack, which produced over 10 million requests every minute which rendered their site completely inaccessible. May saw another attack also; this time on Poloniex exchange. Users were outraged that they could not trade their virtual currency. The attack was unsuccessful, and no assets were stolen, but regardless of this, it still caused a lot of panic and disruption. The answer to preventing these attacks could be Blockchain Technology, by renting out bandwidth, which will increase the capacity to deal with a larger amount of traffic to the site. Image Source: Pixabay