2013-11-26 WIRED: Want Cheaper Bitcoins? Hit Someone With a DDoS Attack

[zeroday]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/ddos_bitcoin/

The extortionists contacted BTC-China in mid-September. Over instant-message chats, they first said they wanted just a few hundred dollars — paid out in bitcoins, naturally — but the demands soon escalated. BTC-China CEO Bobby Lee doesn’t want to get into specifics, but he says that they claimed to have been hired by one of his competitors. He doesn’t believe this, but he thinks that other Bitcoin companies should be concerned.

“The DDoS attackers are hitting more and more of us, and it’s going to be a widespread problem,” he says. Since, September, there have been dozens of these attacks on BTC-China. According to Lee, one of them used up a remarkable 100 G/bits per second in bandwidth.

[kwest]

I think in the long run, things like this is good. It motivates us to build better infrastructure that can safeguard against these kinds of attacks. I wouldn't mind seeing more cooperation between exchanges, making things more decentralized - but at the same time more unified. If one goes down in China, a fail-safe triggers in Germany etc.

[exstasie]

I think in the long run, things like this is good. It motivates us to build better infrastructure that can safeguard against these kinds of attacks. I wouldn't mind seeing more cooperation between exchanges, making things more decentralized - but at the same time more unified. If one goes down in China, a fail-safe triggers in Germany etc.

There will be a need for infrastructure that can provide insurance against attacks like these.  I know that could cause some issues, but having attacks like this is definitely a barrier to entry for non-technical people and the common people.  This could prevent mass adoption if people are scared there wallets can be stolen like that!

[pinger]

I think in the long run, things like this is good. It motivates us to build better infrastructure that can safeguard against these kinds of attacks. I wouldn't mind seeing more cooperation between exchanges, making things more decentralized - but at the same time more unified. If one goes down in China, a fail-safe triggers in Germany etc.

There will be a need for infrastructure that can provide insurance against attacks like these.  I know that could cause some issues, but having attacks like this is definitely a barrier to entry for non-technical people and the common people.  This could prevent mass adoption if people are scared there wallets can be stolen like that!

A DDoS attack doesn't mean wallets are stolen, is a denial of service attack. It can be a wallet is not reachable until the attack is finished, but not stealed if the site is a wallet site.

[Mike Hearn]

It motivates us to build better infrastructure that can safeguard against these kinds of attacks.

It motivates everyone who wants to run a Bitcoin business to pay large quantities of dollars to Cloudfare or Prolexic. Not very decentralised, is it? And of course those services don't come for free. It converts a DDoS on the companies website into a DDoS on the companies wallet.

These sorts of attacks are never good. The people doing this need to be found and jailed.