OKCoin, the leading Chinese bitcoin exchange has successfully managed to thwart a coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The DDoS attack prevented users from accessing OKCoin’s services for about 20 minutes last Friday, without causing any damage to the company’s cybersecurity infrastructure.
The instances of cyberattacks against bitcoin based businesses are increasing gradually. Cybercriminals have managed to compromise few such businesses lately, leading to loss of millions of dollars in bitcoin along with customer login and personal details in some cases. While many attacks are invasive in nature with an intention of gaining access to the exchange’s hot wallet to steal bitcoins, this DDoS attack on OKCoin seemed to be orchestrated with the intention of influencing bitcoin prices.
Apart from OKCoin, other exchanges including Huobi and Bitfinex faced DDoS attacks simultaneously at the same time. As DDoS attacks are very common on the internet these days, bitcoin exchanges had set up contingencies that could effectively deal with it without compromising security. However, the attackers were unsuccessful in significantly increasing the bitcoin price and sustaining it.
As soon as OKCoin started facing attacks, the company switched its operations to a highly-secure server and launched counter CC attack. By doing so, the company managed to allow users to access the platform just like any other day during the attack. The bitcoin price experienced fluctuations during the attack, but it normalized soon after the attack ended.
OKCoin is now working on further upgrades to their systems’ software and hardware. Due to bitcoin price volatility and issues with access to platform, few users experienced loss and OKCoin intends to compensate them by purchasing 1000 bitcoins and utilizing another 1000 bitcoins from the company’s attack insurance funds to create 2000 bitcoin incident compensation fund.
Exchanges are learning from hacking incidents that are plaguing the industry and taking necessary measures to protect themselves from such attacks.