Cloudflare Blocked Huge DDoS Attack On A Crypto Launchpad Platform

Cloudflare blocked a huge DDoS attack on a crypto launchpad platform that aimed to flood the platform with $15.3 million requests per second so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Cloudflare blocks the attack after detecting it earlier this month. The DDoS attack floods a server or a network with traffic that is enough to disrupt it, making it unavailable to users. DDoS attacks were leveraging exploited computer systems or bots and sent a surge of traffic at the target which makes them harder to detect because all of the traffic is not coming from one IP or a geographic location. Cloudflare didn’t identify the crypto platform that was targeted but said it was a crypto launchpad that was used to identify DeFi rpoejcts for potential investors.

The attack attempted to inundate the crypto launchpad with 15.3 million requests per second and become one of the biggest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record. HTTP is used to send data between web servers and websites and it is a more secure and newer version of the protocol which encrypts the sent data and offers more security, Cloudflare product manager Omer Yachimik and the system engineer Julien Desgats explained in a blog that these attacks require more computing power to execute than other HTTP-centric attacks. The attempted attack on the crypto launchpad used a botnet with upwards of 6000 unique bots. The reports show:

“It originated from 112 countries around the world. Almost 15% of the attack traffic originated from Indonesia, followed by Russia, Brazil, India, Colombia, and the United States.”

The Cloudflare researchers said that were tracking the botnet that launched the attack but didn’t identify it or the launchpad that it targeted. The Botnet DDoS attacks which leverage bigger networks of exploited machines have been on the rise lately. That is in part to the number of devices that are connected to the internet which can become targets of malware and turn them into bots. Nokia Deefield co-founder Craig Labovitz noted:

“The torrent of poorly secured IoT devices entering the market each month is fueling the DDoS fire—doubling or tripling the number of exploitable devices each year, with many of them with high-speed internet connectivity and running full-stack Linux. Not only are DDoS attacks larger, but they are also significantly more challenging to detect and mitigate.”

These DDos attacks have long been an issue for the crypto industry. In late 2017, amid the ICO boom, Cloudflare noted a surge in DDoS attacks and said a few crypto exchanges were targeted. In 2020, Bitfinex, BitMEX, and OKEX all suffered DDoS attacks and in the same year, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao blamed the rival exchanges for these attacks and causing lag and interruption of network access. Most recently, Solana blamed the attack for a 17-hour network outage back in September which causes the price of the tokens to fall by 18%.