Posted on December 21, 2020 at 3:43 PM
Bitcoin.org Suffers a DDoS Attack
A recent report reveals that Bitcoin code hosting website Bitcoin.org, briefly suffered a Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and the firm was down on Saturday morning.
The website hosts Bitcoin Code, the widely used software version of bitcoin’s code. However, the website was only affected by the DDoS attack and not the Bitcoin’s blockchain.
The site’s pseudonymous developer Cøbra Cobra published a tweet on Saturday, informing users that the site has suffered a DDoS attack by an unknown hacker. Cobra said the attack is a big one and the attackers seem determined to keep the site down for as long as they can.
“https://t.co/OsFgRFRRZb is currently under a massive DDoS attack. …it’s really huge, and they seem determined to keep it down.” Cobra stated.
DDOS attack as Bitcoin price reaches unprecedented levels
Although the website was not accessible, Bitcoiners circulated the software to newcomers who want to download the code through torrenting service.
Updates for Bitcoin client includes a “magnet lnk” that can be shared manually Bitcoin Core download from services such as BitTorrent and uTorrent.
Via the link, users can find the hash where Bitcoin Core is stored on the services and download the software.
The DDoS attack occurs when a threat actor sends large data requests to a particular server to clog its bandwidth and generally make the website unreachable to genuine users.
The DDoS attack is coming when Bitcoin is doing exceptionally well in the market. According to Cobra, DDoS attacks are not new during the Bitcoin price spike and there could be more attacks during this time. He said the rate of DDoS attacks on networks are usually high during an all-time-high (ATH) of Bitcoin or other assets.
Russian hackers involved again
Cobra also stated that the attackers could be Russian because the IP address from which the attacks were launched is from Russia. However, he quickly pointed out that the attackers could be working from another location.
That’s because the attackers could use VPNs to launch the DDoS attack and hide their location. Also, most of the attackers launch DDoS attacks on networks using malware-infested devices. So, it may not be straightforward to say the attacker launched the attack from Russia.
Attack a blockchain has never been successful
However, Bitcoin.org is now back online and full service has resumed, according to Cobra. He said the DDoS attack took the site down temporarily, but it may still go down again if the hackers are persistent with their attack.
Bitcoin.org was originally owned and registered by Bitcoin’s first two developers Martti Malmi and Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, the ownership of the domain was given to other people when Satoshi left the project, separate from the Bitcoin developers. The idea was to prevent any claim of ownership by one person or a group of people.
With the rise of Bitcoin prices and other cryptocurrency prices, the levels of DDoS attacks have increased on networks. In most cases, the plan is to jam the network and make it inaccessible to users, like the situation with Bitcoin.org. The Bitcoin.org site was mainly used for releasing fresh versions of the Bitcoin Core software.
However, today the website is an independent open-source project with several contributors all over the world. Although the site was down for a couple of hours, Cobra has announced that users can start contributing and using the site as usual since it is now back online.
