Bitcoin exchange suffers DDoS attacks, claims it’s a victim of its own success

Massive online trading website, Mt. Gox, experienced a serious crash yesterday. The site is the largest online trading website of digital currency and trades about 70% of the Bitcoin pie. Mt. Gox is suspected of being a massive contributor to this week’s recent 40% drop of Bitcoin value after suffering a 12-hour DDoS (Disrupted Denial of Service). The site was unavailable after it suffered an attack and experienced heavy online traffic.

This means that 70% of this massive digital currency stopped in trade for half a day as people trying to gain access to the Mt. Gox website experienced a “504 Gateway Timeout Error.”

Bitcoin suffered a massive blow as a result falling from an all time high of US$260 to US$120 per Bitcoin. Last week, as Bitcoin became more and more popular in trade, the Mt. Gox “experienced serious lag” and an eventual shutdown as the popular digital currency reached its record-high value. The exchange says that it wanted downtime and created a period for investors to “cool off”. This downtime also meant that Mt. Gox had time to update its experience to catch up with demand.

In a statement Mt.Gox mentioned that the people behind the attacks are either abusing the system because they want to hurt the system or, by manipulating the market, abuse the system for profit gain. The latter reason for the attack encourages a Panic Sale after which Bitcoins are then bought at a low price. “Repeat this [attack] two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.”

Although suffering attacks, the company claims it was a “victim of its own success” as people started to panic and trading at an unexpected rate, the exchange froze. Figures given in this announcement by Mt. Gox indicate that “the number of trades executed tripled in the last 24hrs” and that the number of new accounts opened went from 60 000 in March to 75 000 in April (11 days).

The company also says that we could expect the server to go down for two hours today as it is still bringing out new updates and adding new servers to its system.