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DDoS Attack

Cardano Fights Off DDoS Attack: Network Holds Steady

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The Cardano blockchain successfully thwarted a DDoS attack without significantly impacting the network. According to reports, the attackers intended to hinder user access by overwhelming the network with spam transactions. Although the attack on the Cardano network did not compromise any staked ADA or blockchain funds, it did expose how fundamental checks were sacrificed, allowing the attack to occur in the first place.

Intersect, a Cardano-based platform stated that the network recently faced increased congestion, leading to challenges for some Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) due to heightened block height conflicts. Despite these issues, the blockchain remained operational within the expected parameters, causing only minor delays in transaction processing and a slight reduction in chain density.

Cardano recently faced a DDoS attack, but the network performed as anticipated, merely experiencing a slowdown. Most services, including SundaeSwap, which processed 5013 orders, operated effectively during the attack. The attacker incurred transaction fees, ultimately losing money without causing significant disruption. Cardano is the winner because its resilience has been proven.

To address these challenges, a task force has been mobilized to identify and implement a solution capable of mitigating such spam attacks effectively. Intersect also promised regular updates through Discord and other social channels. “Once a viable solution has been thoroughly tested and validated, a new node version will be released for SPOs to upgrade, ensuring the network remains robust and resilient against future disruptions,” the platform added.

Cardano Eyes Bullish Breakout

Cardano’s native token ADA showed signs of bullish divergence, hinting at a massive price surge in the near term. This occurs when the price is consolidating at tight ranges or is lower while a momentum oscillator like the RSI makes a higher low.

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Cardano Fights Off DDoS Attack: Network Holds Steady 2

In short, the bears are running out of steam, and the bulls are gearing up for a powerful rally. In the past, a similar pattern led to Cardano hitting sky-highs, leaving bears in the dust. Although it remains to be seen if the past scenarios play out, Gambardello believes this time, the stakes are even higher. The current dip presents an ideal entry point for traders who are eyeing potential gains.

Tether Under Mass DDoS Siege; More Details

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Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin had a major scare when CTO Paolo Ardoino confirmed that its website Tether_to was under a massive DDoS attack. “They tried already once. On a normal day, we have around 2k reqs/5min The attack brought us to 8M reqs/5min”, he wrote.

Ardoino further informed that the attack has been mitigated by Cloudflare but it still left ‘I’m under attack mode’ enabled” as a preventive measure.

According to the top exec, the additional security move “won’t affect the ability to redeeming”.

Recently the blockchain-enabled platform released a blog dispelling gossip over its commercial paper holdings. Rumors were doing the rounds that 85% of Tether’s reserves are commercial papers and that are being traded at a 30 percent discount in China and Asia.

The firm then alleged that those were “coordinated” conspiracies trying to profit at a testing time.

“These rumors are completely false and likely spread to induce further panic in order to generate additional profits from an already stressed market,” the blog states. “Tether condemns such attempts which oftentimes see simple users take the biggest hit, while few coordinated funds increase their profits.”

“Tether Always Maintained Adequate Reserves”

In 2021, Tether was fined $41 million by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for making “untrue or misleading statements and omissions of material fact” about its reserves.

In its response, the team stated that “it has always maintained adequate reserves and has never failed to satisfy a redemption request” and that the CFTC had only found that “the reserves were not all in cash and all in a bank account titled in Tether’s name, at all times.”

Apart from that, the firm through its latest blog sought to allay additional concerns with a report dated March 31, which reaffirms that “over 47% of total USDT reserves are now US Treasuries and that commercial paper makes up less than 25% of USDT’s backing”.

On a final note, the Tether chose to dissociate itself after reports emerged that it might be the next to go down in the market bloodbath after lending platform Celsius’ and crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capitals’ near insolvency crisis.

Multiple DDoS Attacks Target Web3 Lifestyle App STEPN

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A massive distributed denial of service or DDoS zeroed in on a Solana-based lifestyle app that encourages users to “move-to-earn” STEPN, this weekend. Notifying the same via Twitter, the platform announced that once recovery is complete, updates would be announced soon.

In the series of tweets, the platform urged users to pause during the maintenance or “otherwise the work-outs may not be recorded properly,” it read.

It also assured users that the developers are working on the application to resume their services after the attacks.

Just a few days back, the popular move-to-earn app unveiled a new ANTI-CHEAT mechanism to combat fraud. The gaming app, which recently announced it would remove GPS support in China, had to be taken into maintenance for several hours to implement the change.

Unfortunately, some users were mistaken to be bots via the new system due to the DDoS attack on the server.

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Multiple DDoS Attacks Target Web3 Lifestyle App STEPN 4

The application is reportedly back online as “data transfers have reopened and… also improved the rules and formulated processing and identification rules.” The report also stressed the need for an anti-cheating update, stating,

The anti-cheating update may seem small, but it is actually an important cornerstone of STEPN’s long-term development.

How did the token fare?

As reported by TronWeekly, the app that was conceived in 2021, saw its native token GMT’s market cap reach nearly $860 million, as of May 22. Following the latest onslaught, GMT was down by over 6% in a few hours. At press time it is trading at $0.157, a marginal increase of 4%.

Biggest-Ever DDoS Attack To Hit A Decentralized Platform

DDoS is a cyber-attack in which a perpetrator aims to make a network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting the services of a host connected to a network.

One of the most powerful distributed denials of service attacks ever recorded was on the content-delivery network Cloudflare in April 2022. The incident raised significant attention because it was delivered through 15.3 million HTTP requests, one of the largest in scale.

Because HTTPS requests are much more compute-intensive, it highlighted the attackers’ capability to put much more strain on the target.

NFT marketplace LooksRare site restored after a brief DDoS attack

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Newly launched Nft marketplace LooksRare suffered a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack briefly in the late hours of Jan 29, 2022. Following this, the backend team responded in a short time, and within the minutes, the website was restored back again with users applauding the quick response. Some even threw a jibe at its larger competitor OpenSea.

This isn’t the first time the Nft platform has encountered a DDoS attack. On 11 January 2022, just hours after its launch, the LooksRare website became unavailable in the wee hours owing to the DDoS onslaught. Some users complained that they were not able to connect their wallets and list their NFTs. 

The team soon had the site back online though it was revealed that the wallet issue persists, with some users still coming up with other tethering problems.

LooksRare massive daily volumes a wash trading?

The manner in which LooksRare debuted this year hogged significant attention form the NFT community. Previously TronWeekly had reported the official launch of the marketplace that featured a vampire-style attack by enabling users to claim its native LOOKS tokens for free in an effort to poach users from the dominant rival OpenSea.

The attempt did manage to rake an eye-popping $105 million in trading volume just one day after it went live. As per data provided in the Dune Analytics dashboard, in a span of just 24 hours, the newbie non-fungible token marketplace has generated 613 ETH [nearly $2 million] in platform fees to be distributed to LOOKS token stakes in the coming hours.

Not only that, the fledgling digital collectibles marketplace has even surpassed Opensea in terms of daily volume in the same time period. Statistics revealed a total of 3,264 Looksrare traders have executed $385.39 million in sales on January 12, 2022, as the platform saw a 1,461% surge in daily volume.

According to CryptoSlam, LooksRare’s trading volume exceeded $8 billion in wash trades on 29 January 2022 but there is more than meets the eye. The platform is loaded with wash trading as users attempt to game the trading rewards model, according to the data aggregator.

Iconic Bitcoin.org website starts functioning again after DDoS attack

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Troubles for Bitcoin.org are far from over. The website, which happens to be one of the oldest Bitcoin sites designed specifically for educational purposes, has been hit with a denial-of-service attack [DDoS] attack. This was reported by the pseudonymous webmaster of Bitcoin.org, ‘Cøbra’ who tweeted,

“Bitcoin.org getting hit with an absolutely massive DDoS attack and a ransom demand to send Bitcoin or they’ll continue. I don’t think I’ve been this offended in a while. Ungrateful scum.”

The latest reports revealed that the attackers want to be paid off with BTC worth just over $17,000.

According to Cloudfare, DDoS is a cyber-attack where the malicious entity seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users momentarily or indefinitely which involves disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet.

This news comes just a week after nChain’s controversial exec Craig Wright won a default judgment in his copyright infringement action against ‘Cøbra.’ The London’s High Court had ruled that the website discontinue hosting its copy of the Bitcoin white paper after the owner of the site remained absent from the ruling which made it easier for Wright to win by default.

While the website is now functioning normally, it is important to note that prominent crypto platforms have come under DDoS attacks over the past few years.

A brief history on Bitcoin.org

The website in question was first registered and owned by the world’s largest cryptocurrency’s first two developers, Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi. After Nakamoto left the project, he gave ownership of the domain to other individuals in addition to the BTC developers, to expand responsibility and prevent any one person or group from easily attaining power over the project.

It has come a long way since then. During 2011-2013, the website was originally used for rolling out new versions of the software that is now known as Bitcoin Core. In 2013, it underwent a major revamp and was redesigned to include several pages, listing additional BTC software, and building the translation system. The next year, developer documentation was added which consisted of updates, fixes, suggestions, and amendments from members of the community. After a decade later, the site claims to be an independent open source project with contributors all across the globe.

Cryptocurrency Exchange Bitrue Hit by a DDoS Attack

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The digital asset management platform, Bitrue suffered a distributed denial-of-service [DDoS] attack on 20th September. This led to the web services on the platform being unavailable. Bitrue further revealed that a few app functions that rely on web services were also affected.

Its official tweet read,

The platform also revealed that there were “no lasting effects” of the attack and confirmed that all the funds were safe.

Additionally, in February this year, OKEx and Bitfinex suffered multiple sophisticated assaults of DDoS attacks. The first attack on OKEx routed nearly 200 gigabytes per second of traffic. In less than 24-hours another denial attack followed, this time on Bitfinex, which put a strain on the platform’s activity. During the same OKEx was hit with a second attack by the bad actors routing 400 gigabytes per second of traffic.

Cryptocurrency exchanges weren’t the only targets of DDoS attacks. Nearly a month ago, the New Zealand stock exchange was hit by a DDoS attack which led to a series of outages as a result of targeted disruption by cybercriminals who demanded Bitcoin in order to cease the attack.

 A quick primer: 

DDoS attack is a method of disruption on the Internet and does not require much sophistication or effort. By overloading a target with bogus traffic, a malicious actor is able to make a website or service unavailable. One of the many reasons as to why this is done could potentially be for the purpose of suspending trading in order to achieve some kind of pricing advantage.

Upon analyzing some of the DDoS attacks hitting the many cryptocurrency exchanges on CloudFlare network in order to gauge any visible patterns of interest, the eb-infrastructure and website-security company found that the prominent volume of DDoS traffic originated from SSDP amplification attacks, NTP amplification attacks, and application-layer attacks.

While most cryptocurrency exchanges have been able to recover from the impact of a Distributed Denial of Service attacks within a single day, however, with trading coming to a complete halt due to it essentially implies that a long-lasting DDoS attack could severely affect the revenues of the platform.