This is standard fare for any popular forum or website, especially when money is involved.
Pretty much all niches get hit, legal, illegal, and inbetween.
Gambling sites, pharmaceutical sites, porn sites, carding forums and dumps/cvv vending websites, big bank websites, ALL get hit with DDoS and DoS attacks quite regularly.
It's just a strongarm tactic of trying to extort funds, and those with the most bandwidth usually win.
It is important to understand the difference between DoS attacks and DDoS attacks:
DoS - denial of service - This method of attack is conducted by using a single machine to exploit a vulnerability in the infrastructure or software of a web server, causing the site to go offline. This can be prevented by proper software and server configurations.
DDoS - distributed denial of service - This method of attack is conducted using dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of infected machines are flooding a site with useless traffic, overwhelming its resources and taking it offline. This attack cannot be prevented by proper software and server configurations. These botnets are usually rented, but are sometimes owned by the attacker directly. This result is usually a case of those with the most bandwidth will win. Good hardware load balancers can fend of these types of attack, especially in conjunction with a hosting company that specializes in hosting sites targeted for DDoS attacks.
Any small to medium sized website will not be able to fend off a large DDoS attack without the proper equipment and resources.
We should just look at these attacks as a clear sign that BTC is here to stay, and is considered valuable enough for criminal elements to attempt extortion on site owners.
Large site owners just need to step up their game and grow as fast as Bitcoin, or at least try to keep up.
It's not easy, but it will be fun, and definitely interesting to see how these Bitcoin cyber wars play out.
This is one of the main reasons why I do most of my business over instant messaging and e-mail and through this forum and IRC. Unless an attacker takes out multiple large networks, they won't be able to shut me down 100%, at most just inconvenience me on some avenues.
Btw, if anyone ever contacts you pretending to be me on different screen names than the ones I have listed, send me a PM immediately!!!
