Every time a major Bitcoin exchange suffers from a direct denial of service attack, there will be people who claim something else entirely is going on. More specifically, the Bitfinex platform is experiencing such an attack as we speak. Some people have posited that it is not an attack, but rather a case of many people looking to get their money off this exchange. Discussions like these are always fun to keep an eye on, as the theories users come up with get crazier by the week.
Bitfinex DDoS Should be of no Concern
Things have certainly evolved in a rather interesting direction for the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. This year alone, the company became the world’s leading Bitcoin exchange in terms of trading volume. That was rather unexpected, even though Bitfinex has a solid reputation owing to being around for many years. Unfortunately for the platform, its reputation has taken a few big hits this year due to some rather troublesome developments affecting this company.
For one thing, the Bitfinex exchange lost its Taiwanese banking partner earlier this year. That news came as quite a shock to many people, even though experienced users saw this coming. That’s not because the company did anything wrong by any means, but its partner bank did not adhere to new US banking regulations in time. As a result, Bitfinex users couldn’t request USD withdrawals or make USD deposits. It was an uneasy situation which was only resolved earlier this week.
Additionally, there is the whole Bitfinex-Tether connection which still has a lot of people concerned right now. Once again, nothing surprising there, as the way Tether operates is very suspicious at best. Although it seems to have the financial asset reserves to warrant a vast increase in the supply of USDT, not everyone sees it that way. Considering that the CEOs of Bitfinex and Tether are one and the same individual, it is evident there may be a lot more going on here than people realize right now.
Bitfinex is under DDoS attack. The DDoS attack started during earlier maintenance and has been ongoing since.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) November 26, 2017
With a DDoS attack taking place right after the company enabled USD transfers and added EUR transfers, it is evident there is plenty of reason for people to be suspicious of Bitfinex. It would seem a convenient time to claim the existence of a DDoS, even though the message sent out by the company may be perfectly legitimate, for all we know. Moreover, the company’s infrastructure has held up a lot better under a DDoS compared to most cryptocurrency platforms which are seemingly operating at full capacity. Kraken is one of those exchanges which just seems incapable of dealing with any serious volume.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes Bitfinex to recover from this latest attack. Dealing with a DDoS attack is not fun for anyone involved, especially not for the company involved. Moreover, the backlash on social media over issues like this one will only get worse as time progresses. Bitcoin users support a lot of conspiracy theories these days, especially when it comes to popular cryptocurrency exchanges. It is difficult to prove them wrong, even though common sense doesn’t always back up such theories.
We can only hope that Bitfinex will solve the problem swiftly and that withdrawals and deposits will not be impacted in any major way. Only time will tell if that occurs, though, as there is no indication as to who might be behind this latest DDoS attack. Additionally, it raises the question as to why companies are still unable to prevent DDoS attacks in 2017. They should know a lot better by now.
