A few minutes ago a statement was published by BitMEX, an important exchange in the crypto scene, which warns users that today the site has suffered 2 DDoS attacks.
Between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC 13 March 2020 we became aware of a hardware issue with our cloud service provider causing BitMEX requests to be delayed. Normal service resumed at 03:00 UTC. As a reminder, latest system updates can be found on our status page https://t.co/fVa1FAqSEW
— BitMEX (@BitMEX) March 13, 2020
In this morning’s tweet BitMex had already written that it had hardware problems with cloud services and that caused a delay throughout the platform, a problem that was solved after about half an hour, as evidenced by the good state of the various services of the platform.
However, the details came only a few minutes ago: the statement explains that the platform has suffered a double attack and that it took about 25 minutes to solve it.
The DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was aimed at undermining the systems and resources that keep the service active, overloading the requests to the servers.
This type of attack is very effective because it does not allow the system to stop the requests since there are thousands and all at the same time. Usually DDoS attacks are organized through bots.
The purpose is very clear and in this case it was intended to block the exchange to prevent it from working properly. In these hours the price of several crypto is recovering, but blocking a platform like BitMex would have meant perhaps a slowdown in this recovery because it would have prevented users to buy and sell assets.
The negative comments on Twitter are wasted and some people are pointing the finger at the timing of the DDoS attack that occurred in conjunction with the recent collapse of crypto prices.
Moreover, the fact of being a centralized exchange does not help and always puts users’ funds on the platform at serious risk.
