Posted on October 25, 2017 at 12:12 PM
DDoS Attack Takes Down Bitcoin Gold Website
The latest Bitcoin fork project’s website suffered extensive damages after a huge DDoS attack.
The latest Bitcoin fork project, Bitcoin Gold (BTG) officially forked from the bitcoin blockchain last night at midnight. The project has been controversial ever since its introduction.
Unfortunately, new events have only added to the controversy when the BTG developer’s team announced via Twitter that the website suffered a “massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack”. The DDoS attack effectively took down the project’s entire site.
According to the bitcoin developer, Jimmy Song, BTG was suggested rather abruptly by the China-based bitcoin miner Jack Liao. The aim of BTG is to develop an ASIC-resilient mining network, which will bridge the gap between GPUs and CPUs, especially as ASIC mining is significantly smaller.
Several critics have pointed out that similar attempts have been made in the past that proved unsuccessful at best. The BTG team have stated that they will distribute BTG coins to all users who have bitcoin after the hard fork takes place.
Massive DDoS attack on our cloud site. 10M requests per minute. We are working with the providers to ban all the IPs. We will be up soon!
— Bitcoin Gold [BTG] (@bitcoingold) October 24, 2017
The latest DDoS attack has added to the mounting skepticism surrounding BTG, as it made the limited information available on BTG even more scarce. Currently, users are unable to keep track of BTG’s development and problems since the website is down. In addition, BTG’s specific algorithm has still not been made publicly available. According to CCN reports, even though the BTG development team confirmed that the DDoS has been dealt with, CCN was still unable to access the BTG website.
DDoS attacks have grown increasingly common, especially when used to target controversial cryptocurrency projects. So far, BTG has attracted a lot of controversies. Several users pointed out that BTG will essentially use a process that privately creates a cryptocurrency before making it available to the public. Several users also stated on Github that the developers implemented a pre-mine code that has a low difficulty level. The implementation of a pre-mining script has allowed several users to question the legitimacy of the project as well as the team responsible.
In addition, most cryptocurrency exchange platforms have deemed BTG’s codebase to not be functional enough to add support for it on their platforms. This includes the popular exchange, Bittrex, who refused to add the cryptocurrency to their platform.
The BTG team has not given updates or more information regarding the DDoS. However, many users responded to their initial tweet about the attack, by questioning their replay attack implementation. BTG has also previously come under attack for its lack of added replay attack protections. The lack thereof could ostensibly have been made the project vulnerable to attack.
