Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another strong DDoS attack’

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/21/here-we-go-again-top-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-taken-down-for-hours-by-another-strong-ddos-attack/

by Lightning • 13 years ago

30 47 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

the_cat_kittles• 13 years ago

Who stands to gain from repeatedly DDoSing Mt. Gox?

olalonde• 13 years ago

Other Bitcoin exchanges.

fchollet• 13 years ago

Speculators. Slowing down exchanges drives the price of BTC down. So the plan is to start a massive DDoS, stop it, buy BTC at a lower price, and sell it again when the prices went back to their previous levels.

pemulis• 13 years ago

The two most obvious culprits would be:

1) People trying to make the price of bitcoins drop, so that they can buy low and sell high. (This possibility is called out in the article.)

2. Criminals trying to extract a ransom from Mt. Gox, which is losing a lot of revenue and trust every minute their site is down.

rubinelli• 13 years ago

I think (2) is more likely at this point. There's only so much a market will take before it tanks and stays down for months. This kind of market (along with porn and gambling) is a great target for botnet controllers trying to make a buck.

willlll2• 13 years ago

People who want it to go back to its original function of a magic the gathering online exchange

ConceitedCode• 13 years ago

Is that really how it started? What prompted the change?

jvm• 13 years ago

Nobody's mentioned it, but their competitors would be the big obvious winners. I don't know if I think they are the likely culprits, but Mt Gox has a major network advantage right now over its competitors which is surely being drained by these attacks.

mikemoka3• 13 years ago

Is something like a distributed peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange in the works? Will something like that ever be released?

swinglock• 13 years ago

Distributed how? I don't think such a thing is possible, someone will have to deal with the banks.

mikemoka3• 13 years ago

I edited the original post, what I was referring to was a P2P bitcoin exchange, impossible to DDoS, and possibly built upon the technology shown by the bitcoin project itself

dmix• 13 years ago

Bitcoin exchanges are already distributed. Free markets are decentralized.

If MtGox can't function, there are plenty of competitors.

citricsquid• 13 years ago

There's already quite a few bitcoin exchanges and some people are working on a new open source exchange: http://www.reddit.com/r/buttercoin

whackedspinach• 13 years ago

An idea for this has been proposed. See the "ripple currency exchange":

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Ripple_currency_exchange

pdog• 13 years ago

Yeah. Check out Ripple:

https://ripple.com/

scoot• 13 years ago

How the heck did they get a 2-sylable 6-character dictionary word .com domain for this?!

terhechte• 13 years ago

Thanks for the link. What I couldn't find out while reading the site: Since it is a decentralized network, who runs the nodes, what's the incentive for doing so? I suppose running a node will give you their ripple currency, but this information seems to be not visible on their site. Apart from that, it looks like a really interesting project.

lectrick3• 13 years ago

Not open source (at least, not yet, for the server-side).

The client side is on Github, but has absolutely no tests. Literally, the stub files for the tests are there, but that's it.

Node.JS dev community really needs to get religion with testing.

But lastly, it's also somewhat centralized. While you can run a Ripple daemon locally, the actual currency's distribution is centralized. Which I think is... not smart.

epscylonb• 13 years ago

I don't see any way to do a decentralized exchange, at some point in needs to deal with local currencies.

I can see a federated exchange, lot's of exchanges using using each others liquidity to do trades.

foobarqux• 13 years ago

The recent repeated abuse of the term DDoS by ignorant members of the bitcoin community is misleading and confusing.

The first D in DDoS mean "distributed". There has never been any evidence of a distributed attack.

Server overload from heavy use of an application is not a DoS attack. A 37 transaction per second capacity suggests that MtGox simply cannot handle even moderate trading activity.

The frequent small trades that the exchange sometimes sees can reasonably be explained by bots trying to exploit the market in some way and not to attack availability of the exchange itself.

Zidewinder4• 13 years ago

At least some of these incidents appear to be actual DDoS attacks. It's true that Gox's trading engine sucks and is prone to lag during sudden spikes in activity, but many of these incidents have shut the whole service down very abruptly without any preceding increase in trading volume. Not to mention that they've released at least one Prolexic support ticket:

http://i.imgur.com/yPLufjj.png

eof2• 13 years ago

It is clear you are following the situation as closely as those "ignorant members of the bitcoin community"; as MtGox themselves are calling these DDoS attacks and have reasonable proof of such.

It is also true that Gox's matching engine is .. uhh.. not upto snuff, but your accusation that 'ignorant members of the bitcoin community' are just calling everything a DDoS is in itself, quite ignorant.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

Most people don't know what a DoS or DDoS is outside technical circles; and it's become a bit of a joke in the Bitcoin community that every problem anyone encounters with MtGox or pretty much anything else can be attributed to a DDoS attack.

Re: Gox's transaction volume capacity, the market is begging for someone to come along and solve these problems.

runn1ng• 13 years ago

Is (D)Dos on Mt.Gox even a news anymore?

KaeseEs• 13 years ago

It would be easier (for me at least, but I suspect others as well) to take Bitcoins seriously if the backbone of the Bitcoin economy weren't the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange, which apparently is crippled by loads of less than 40 transactions/sec.

Zidewinder4• 13 years ago

It seems a bit fallacious to equate a Dollars-to-Bitcoins exchange with the Bitcoin currency itself. I know it's easy to forget amid this speculative frenzy, but conversion into USD is not really Bitcoin's ultimate purpose. None of these attacks have had any effect on transactions within the Bitcoin network/economy itself.

cjh_2• 13 years ago

Quoting the mtgox homepage which in turn claims to be quoting wikipedia: "As of July 2011, Mt. Gox handles over 80% of all Bitcoin trade".

MTGOX is more than just a USD to bitcoin exchange.

mrb• 13 years ago

Transactions only cause lag on their trading engine. They are not the reason their whole website and online presence disappear!

When MtGox denies service, like today, this is because of a DDoS. They have said multiple times that they see 10+ Gbps (SYN flood and UDP packets) hitting their servers on a weekly basis!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166578.msg1737375#ms...

lectrick3• 13 years ago

Well, that's coming. Give it a few months. There seem to be a number of projects in this space, but I guess it won't be legit for some people until an LMAX Disruptor is written to do BTC FOREX trading.

joshmlewis2• 13 years ago

I'm not usually a conspirator, but what if the US government or another government that didn't want something like bitcoin getting any bigger, was behind this? If this keeps happenings it will diminish the "brand" enough to always make people really cautious. Thoughts? Shooting from the hip here. :)

eof2• 13 years ago

I have thought this as well. The fact that a bunch of exchanges all went down simulatenously and /r/bitcoin had a super-rare non-circle-jerky top-post (calling the bubble bursting), by a brand new member, gave me the impression that there was a coordinated attack going on. TBH, my first thoughts were more of a trading cartel trying to get in cheaper; but government was a possibility as well.

That being said,.. who knows? Certainly can't prove that's the case or even make a good argument for it (although, I do think a good argument could be made that something fishy was going on.

shubb• 13 years ago

If a major state wanted to 'do something' about a website, to the extent that they were happy to break the law, I don't think it would look like this.

rmc• 13 years ago

There are probably easier ways for the US gov to break bitcoin. A 51% attack on the bitcoin network (which requires a lot of computing power), would allow you to transfer all the bitcoins, would be much more crippling than "oh a website went down".

joshmlewis2• 13 years ago

Really? Downvotes for just suggesting a scenario?

drivebyacct2• 13 years ago

People here need to stuff it and read more before running on about Bitcoin - I've seen more biased, uninformed, telephone-word-of-mouth mutilated information, etc. And ironically, some are even running their mouths while accusing others of doing it. Mt.Gox has been being DDoSd , not just from transaction volume (due to their poor trading engine), transaction spam (a "fun" point of contention among people) and from other SYN/UDP flooding.

Everytime, until two days ago, each DDOS correlated in a massive drop off in price - including the air-releasing drop from 260 to 60 back to 120. Two days ago, the attacker lost money, and today, at least as of now and the price it was last night, the price seems to reflect the truth: sadly, mt.gox is a cornerstone right now (not for long) and mt.gox being DDOSd doesn't mean the immediate impending end of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another strong DDoS attack’

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