EXMO, a prominent UK-based crypto exchange, today admitted that its platform was under a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. It tried to paralyze its system with a flood of Internet traffic. After driving the trading services back to life within two hours, normal operations were in sync. However, the platform did not reveal the true nature of the cyberattack. EXMO, famous in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, advocated that the attack was a spiteful attempt to meddle the exchange’s server’s expected traffic.
According to the reports, the exchange witnessed an increase in traffic this Monday at 16:10 GMT. Moreover, the number of connections trying to access its server was enough to disrupt its activity temporarily. This outage was led by another incident, on December 24, in which the hackers gained 5% of EXMO’s assets from its “hot” wallets. The exchange verified soon afterwards that the hackers stole an equivalent of nearly $4 million in customer cryptocurrency. Nonetheless, there’s currently no clear direction towards who’s liable for both attacks and no proof that they are related.
DDoS Attacks growing common in the Crypto Space
Nevertheless, both cyber incidents occur when the Bitcoin price hit a record high. It is probably triggering cybercriminals’ efforts to cash in on the higher value of the stolen assets. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are relatively prevalent in the crypto markets. The malicious attackers try to obstruct the trading service by overwhelming the servers with a wave of unwanted traffic. But, DDoS attacks are a bit less harmful than hacks that induce clients to lose funds.
Founded in 2013, EXMO has its headquarters in London. While Britain moved closer toward an exit from the EU, the crypto exchange operator had decided to expand its new European bases. It is a part of a contingency plan to resume accessing the bloc post-Brexit. With the current presence in Turkey, the Istanbul facility was the start-up’s fourth office outside the UK and its Kiev, Barcelona, and Moscow branches. While it is not shifting resources away from the UK, EXMO’s extension reverberates the sentiment amongst some big banks seeking to strengthen their presence across Europe to counter the impact of Brexit.
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