While 2016 has not been upon us for that long, Bitcoin exchange BTCC is facing a major DDoS attack at the time of publication. As a result of this denial-of-service attack, the website is inaccessible, API’s are not working properly, and other BTCC services may experience problems as well. Some people fear this may have to do with a recent Reddit comment, although the real reason behind this attack remains unknown.
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BTCC DDoS Attack After Strange Reddit Comment
There are plenty of reasons as to why a Bitcoin exchange platform can come under DDoS attack by certain individuals. In most cases this will serve as an attempt to showcase the power of a certain collective of hackers, and possibly lead to some extortion attempts. As a result, of such an attempt, the company in question would be forced to pay an amount of Bitcoin to stop the attacks, although that is never a guarantee.
In the case of this attack against BTCC, however, there could be a completely different reason for DDoSing the platform. As is always the case, there is plenty of speculation on social media and Reddit in regards to what could be going on. One Reddit user pointed out a recent comment made by one of BTCC’s staff members regarding the block size debate.
The comment in question, posted here, states the following:
“It would be much better to have the support of Core, but if Core doesn’t include a block size increase soon in the master branch, we may be willing to start running a fork. Conversation was with Samson Mow and a few others at BTCC HQ. The conversations I had with all of these entities were of an informal, non-binding nature. Positions are subject to change.”
At the time of publication, it was difficult to tell whether or not this comment had anything to do with the DDoS attack against BTCC. Granted, certain individuals might take offense to that remark, although it not a binding statement just yet. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and DDoSing an entity for expressing their thoughts is far from professional.
What we do know is the BTCC website itself is either very slow or completely inaccessible right now. In addition, all of the BTCC API’s are suffering from outages and delays as well. For the time being, there has been no ETA regarding getting services back in operation. BTCC did not indicate how severe the DDoS attack is either.
Source: Twitter
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