Bitcoin.org Suffers Yet Another DDOS Attack

Bitcoin.org has yet again been hit by a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack. Cøbra, the anonymous owner of Bitcoin.org took to his Twitter to announce that the site was compromised with the hackers putting up a scam notice.

Bitcoin developer, Matt Corallo also corroborated the news warning users of the site of the scam and advising them not to send crypto to the address on display. As at the time of writing, the site had been taking down by Namecheap after Corallo’s query. Cøbra expects that the site will be down for a few days.

Before the website was taken down, the hackers reportedly collected about $17000 using a giveaway scam notice displayed on the platform. The message claimed the Bitcoin Foundation was giving back to the community and that only the first 10,000 users could benefit from the offer.

This is the third time Bitcoin.org will be a victim of DDOS attacks and it begs the question, “Why attack a site that contains open source information about Bitcoin and the Blockchain?” Usually, crypto exchanges are the ones that suffer hacker attacks because of the kind of information they tend to hold.

Last year, several crypto exchanges including Binance, OKEx, and Bitfinex were targets of DDoS attacks. More recently, pNetwork lost $12.7 million in bitcoin to hackers too (though not a DDoS attack).

The last attack hon Bitcoin.org happened as July forcing a switch to Cloudflare. And now barely two months after making the switch, the website is down again. Cøbra believes that the fraudsters exploited a flaw in the system’s DNS. In another tweet shared after the website was taken down, Cøbra asked Cloudfare to explain how they were routing his traffic noting that his actual server didn’t get any traffic during the hack.

DDOS attacks in 2021

Compared to 2020, DDOS attacks reduced in 2021 According to Secure List, DDOS attacks were even further down in Q2 with the highest number of attacks in a day at 1164. These attacks were mostly launched on resources in the US, China, Poland, Brazil, and Canada. The longest attack lasted more than 776 hours.

Notable attacks include the DNS flood in April. It disturbed the operation of Xbox Live, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and other Microsoft cloud services but was quickly fixed. Another was the series of attacks that took down Belnet in Belgium forcing the Belgium parliament to suspend sessions.

How It Happens

In a DDoS attack, the target network is swamped with an overwhelming amount of traffic from infected computers in a botnet. The target can vary between a network resource, a website, or a server. The traffic comes in form of connection requests and spam messages.

What happens next is a slowing of the service and eventually, the service is rendered inoperable. The attack is made possible because many companies use centralized content delivery networks (CDNs) to deliver their content globally. It is this centralization that makes servers vulnerable to brute force attacks like DDoS.