Posted on January 5, 2022 at 5:08 PM
Solana Network Was Reportedly Hit By a DDoS Attack Again
The Solana Blockchain, often seen as Ethereum’s direct competitor, has suffered another network outage for the third time within months. The issue is still under investigation, but reports indicate that the collapse of the network could be a result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by threat actors. The hacker is believed to have used spam to carry out the attack.
The Network As Down For About 5 Hours
“Solana went down again at two o’clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th,” according to crypto Journalist Colin Wu. He, however, stated that the network was back to normal service after 5 hours.
There are conflicting reports regarding the number of hours the Solana network was down during the DDoS attack, with some others indicating that it was down for four hours.
However, none of the reports have been confirmed by the Solana Foundation as of the time of writing, but there have been overwhelming complaints from different sources that it witnessed a slowdown.
A DDoS attack is used to overload a network by sending multiple requests. This makes it difficult for the network to respond to genuine requests, hindering it from running effectively.
Solana Suffered A Heavy Slowdown
Several accounts on Twitter stated that Solana suffered a major slowdown rather than an outage.
Members of the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit community stated that the situation is a result of a bug in the Solano system, which puts serious traders at high risks.
The post also noted that it will be wrong to blame the situation on attackers, saying that a properly built blockchain can keep producing blocks according to the parameters of the network. According to the post, the operations of such a network shouldn’t be affected even if someone spammed transactions.
The Third Issue In A Matter Of Months
As has been stated earlier, this will be the third time Solana has been the victim of a DDoS attack. The worrying thing is the fact that they have all occurred within the space of a few months.
In September last year, the Solana Status noted that the network suffered instability over 45 minutes as a result of an attack.
At the time, validators of the network were preparing for a new release. However, it suffered an outage that lasted for 17 hours because of heavy botting activity on Raydium, a Solana-based DEX.
Although there were no funds lost, it affected the reputation of the platform to an extent. Solana drew some criticism from users when the developers decided to restart the network.
On December 13, Solana witnessed another setback, after being repeatedly hit by a DDoS attack. This time, the system remained online throughout but caused slowdown users were not happy about.
Like in the other attack, the co-founder of Solana Raj Gokal stated that the network wasn’t hit by any DDoS attack. Later, the NFT game SolChicks explained that the problem was a result of its Chicks NFT and not a DDoS attack as suspected by many users.
Many experts blamed the network issue on the coordinated DDoS attack on Solana’s proof-of-history (PoH) consensus mechanism ad fundamental design flaws. In line with the assertion, a report by Grayscale Investment also pointed at Solana’s use of PoH as the main reason for the network issues.
“The Solana consensus mechanism uses a new blockchain technology that is not widely used, and may not function as intended,” the report noted. It added that vulnerability could exist within the cryptography, including vulnerabilities that harm the network. The vulnerability may also make the Solana platform very easy and open to cyber attacks, the report continues.
The Solana Network Faces Serious Criticisms
The Solana blockchain is seen as one of the fastest-growing smart contract networks and is gradually being adopted for new nonfungible token (NFT) and DeFi projects. It has also been touted as the fastest blockchain network on the planet.
Its rapidly growing popularity has made people draw comparisons between the network and Ethereum’s blockchain, with some dubbing it the “Ethereum Killer.” But the increasing security issues on the network will b a major setback. Many users have already started complaining about the porosity of the network after witnessing a series of attacks within a short period.
Some posts on Reddit have already expressed their displeasure towards the latest incident. One of the posts stated that a network that constantly goes down will find it difficult to draw the attention of serious traders.
