Major Crypto Exchanges Bitfinex and OKEx Hit by Service Denial Attacks

Both cryptocurrency exchanges have reported distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on their systems in the last 24 hours.

AccessTimeIconFeb 28, 2020 at 10:47 a.m. UTC
Updated Aug 19, 2021 at 1:04 a.m. UTC

Presented By Icon

Election 2024 coverage presented by

Stand with crypto

Two top cryptocurrency exchanges have reported distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on their systems in the last 24 hours.

OKEx, which says it is based in Malta, has apparently suffered two attacks, one Thursday and one Friday, according to its CEO, Jay Hao. On his Weibo account Friday, Hao said the first attack was of a 200 gigabyte severity, but the second had doubled to 400 GB.

  • Bitcoin Mining in the U.S. Will Become 'a Lot More Decentralized': Core Scientific CEO
    13:18
    Bitcoin Mining in the U.S. Will Become 'a Lot More Decentralized': Core Scientific CEO
  • Binance to Discontinue Its Nigerian Naira Services After Government Scrutiny
    05:10
    Binance to Discontinue Its Nigerian Naira Services After Government Scrutiny
  • The first video of the year 2024
    04:07
    The first video of the year 2024
  • The last regression video of the year 3.67.0
    40:07
    The last regression video of the year 3.67.0
  • Despite the attacks, the exchange's service is "largely unaffected," he said. OKEx's Twitter account has no warnings of interruptions this morning, apart from a brief interlude for a systems upgrade for its futures and options trading facility.

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

    The Hong Kong-headquartered platform's trading services were offline for a period of under an hour, but at press time Bitfinex says services are back to normal.

    Bitfinex Chief Technology Officer Paulo Ardoino told CoinDesk later that the "attacker tried to concurrently exploit several platform features to increase load in the infrastructure."

    "We use a variety of different prevention mechanisms to guard against such a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Still, the huge number of different IP addresses used and the sophisticated crafting of the requests towards our API v1 exploited an internal inefficiency in one of our non-core process queues," Ardoino explained.

    With the need to react quickly to avert an escalation in damage, the exchange took the decision to go into maintenance. The CTO said it was "not due to the inability of the platform to resist, rather it was a decision taken in order to quickly bring in the countermeasures and patch for all similar attacks."

    A DDoS attack attempts to overwhelm the hosting servers of an online service, using a flood of fake traffic from multiple computers to disrupt normal activity. A severe attack can take a service offline, or may cause slow responses for website users.

    It's not clear why two major exchanges have been targeted in this way at roughly the same time, or what the attackers hope to gain.

    UPDATE (15:50 UTC, Feb. 28, 2020): Added comment from Bitfinex CTO Paulo Ardoino.

    Disclosure

    Please note that our privacy policy, terms of use, cookies, and do not sell my personal information have been updated.

    CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of the Bullish group, which owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets. CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish group equity-based compensation. Bullish was incubated by technology investor Block.one.


    Learn more about Consensus 2024, CoinDesk's longest-running and most influential event that brings together all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3. Head to consensus.coindesk.com to register and buy your pass now.



    Read more about