This past Friday, top cryptocurrency trading platforms Bitfinex and OKEx were both subjected to malicious Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS) aimed at disrupting the platforms’ operational efficiency by overwhelming the targeted servers with a flood of fraudulent traffic.
Although both platforms successfully thwarted the attacks and have since re-established normal performance, the OKEx CEO is now claiming that competitors were behind the attack, although he has yet to offer any evidence to support this allegation.
Top Crypto Exchanges Face Successive DDoS Attacks
OKEx was the first exchange to face the DDoS attack, with the platform’s CEO, Jay Hao, speaking about the occurrence in a tweet from this past Friday, noting that the platform is well-equipped to handle such incidents and that all users will be protected.
“We’ve detected a planned DDOS attack to our site, 200G yesterday & 400G just now. A message to OKEx users & communities: Be assured, OKEx is well-prepared to deal with these attacks, we have and will always protect our users no matter what.”
Shortly after this announcement, rival crypto trading platform Bitfinex also announced that they too faced a similar attack, with the exchange’s CTO – Paolo Ardoino – explaining that despite the sophistication of the attack, the Bitfinex team was able to “completely annihilate” it while maintaining the safety of users’ funds.
OKEx CEO Launches Bounty to Find Perpetrators, Accuses Rival Platforms
In the time following these attacks, the OKEx CEO launched a bounty to find those who ordered it, saying that he will personally pay the team who was commissioned to carry out the DDoS attack double if they expose its “malicious buyer.”
“Plus a message to any team who got paid to do this (also to Bitfinex), if you’re willing to cooperate with OKEx team and expose the malicious buyer of the DDOS attack with evidence, I’ll personally double pay you.”
This post came shortly after Hao accused rival crypto trading platforms of being the perpetrators behind the attacks in a post on his personal Weibo account.
“Don’t be too furious when someone from a friend ’s technology department buys a ddos attack. It’s easy to trace the source of such a large amount of traffic,” a rough translation of the post reads, with Hao further going on to add that “competing products and technology can’t compete with OKEx, so they bought a ddos to attack us at night.”
At the time of writing, it remains unclear as to whether or not Hao has made any headway in discovering who was behind the recent attacks on both OKEx and Bitfinex. We will update the article with any new developments as they arise.
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