Hackers hit the crypto exchange giant HTX with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on Friday morning, causing a brief outage. A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt by bad actors to flood the target website with traffic to overwhelm the site’s infrastructure. HTX is the newly rebranded name of Huobi. Tron (TRX) founder Justin […]
The post Crypto Exchange Giant HTX Hit With DDOS Attack, Justin Sun Says User Funds Are Safe appeared first on The Daily Hodl.
In just under two weeks, the number of unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin network has skyrocketed from 134,000 to over 390,000, causing a bottleneck in the mempool. This surge in unconfirmed transactions has resulted in a staggering 343% increase in transaction fees, which have risen from $1.99 per transaction on April 26 to a current […]
Apart from trying to get rid of cheating and bots, Stepn is also working to limit its platform’s availability for users in mainland China.
Solana-based move-to-earn application Stepn has reported multiple denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the aftermath of the platform proceeding with a major anti-cheating upgrade.
Stepn took to Twitter on June 5 to report that the platform has suffered a number of DDoS attacks causing recovery maintenance and associated improper performance.
1/2
— STEPN | Public Beta Phase IV (@Stepnofficial) June 5, 2022
We have been under multiple DDOS attacks in the past hours. Securing the servers and recovery may take anywhere from 1 to 12 hours. We recommend you take some rest during the maintenance or otherwise the work-outs may not be recorded properly.
According to the statement, Stepn was expecting to secure and recover the servers in up to 12 hours but has not posted an update for 20 hours by the time of writing.
“Our engineers are working hard to fix the problems. We will announce here once recovery is complete. Thank you so much for everyone’s patience,” Stepn wrote.
The attacks came shortly after Stepn introduced its anti-cheating system referred to as “Stepn’s Model for Anti-Cheating,” or SMAC, on June 3. The system aims to eliminate fake users from the platform as well as to prevent fraudulent motion data on the Stepn app in an attempt to gain unfair profit from the platform.
“SMAC system specifically targets the movement simulation by amending real walking/running data, thanks to our machine learning algorithm,” the anti-cheating system’s description reads.
Stepn reported on major platform issues soon after proceeding with the upgrade, with SMAC mistakenly identifying some genuine users as bots. Other problems included network issues caused by a “25 million DDOS attack” as well as the temporary inability to track any bots on the platform.
“We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience caused to users. The anti-cheating update may seem small, but it is actually an important cornerstone of Stepn's long-term development,” Stepn said.
Despite the platform's DDoS issues, Stepn’s native token, the Green Satoshi Token (GST), has not seen any critical decline over the past several days. On the contrary, the GST is up around 10% over the past 24 hours, trading at $1.04 at the time of writing. The token’s market capitalization amounts to $624 million, according to data from CoinGecko.
Related: People want to be paid crypto to exercise in the Metaverse: Survey
Launched in December 2021, Stepn is a major move-to-earn mobile nonfungible token (NFT) game allowing users to earn tokens by walking, jogging or running outdoors with an NFT sneaker. The game has a dual token system, including the GST token and the Governance Token (GMT).
The news comes as Stepn prepares to limit its platform’s availability for users in mainland China by mid-July.
Developers have suggested changing Solana’s current data transfer protocol UDP to QUIC, stake-weighted transaction processing and a fee-based transaction priority.
The Solana network faced its seventh outage on Saturday, resulting in a downtime of over seven hours. The developer team has released an outage report, along with three key mitigation steps to make the network more stable.
The network outage on Solana was caused by a significant surge in the number of transactions due to nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots. The bots used Candy Machine, a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections.
The transaction volume reached six million per second, overflowing individual nodes with 100 Gbps data. As a result, validators ran out of data memory, leading to a loss of consensus among them.
The developers ruled out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and blamed NFT minting bots for the congestion. The network came online at 3:30 am UTC on Sunday.
The official report highlighted three key mitigation steps that are in work to make the Solana network more resilient against such congestion issues. The first major step is to move from its current data transfer protocol called user datagram protocol (UDP) to Google-developed quick UDP internet connection (QUIC). QUIC offers fast asynchronous communication like UDP, but with sessions and flow control like transmission control protocol.
The second key step is the integration of stake-weighted transaction processing instead of its current first-come-first-serve basis. The developers claimed a stake-weighted transaction processing along with QUIC would be more robust.
The third mitigation step is to introduce “fee-based execution priority,” where users would have the option to add an additional fee on top of the base fee. The fee prioritization is set for the v1.11 release.
Related: Solana DAOs can now bug you to vote with phone calls and texts
Apart from the Solana network outage, an even bigger controversy was the beta cluster restart instructions, reportedly issued by validator operators. The said instructions asked validators to block NFT minting bots manually at the layer-1 layer.
However, Solana’s head of communication Austin Federa said that the majority of validators kept their distance from censoring and a new update is being introduced on the Candy Machine with additional anti-bot features.
This is factually inaccurate – for starters these instructions weren't issued by Solana Foundation.
— Austin Federa (@Austin_Federa) May 1, 2022
Second, very few validators have adopted this.
Third, @metaplex is deploying an update to Candy Machine with additional anti-botting.
The international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous has vowed to attack Russian government websites over the recent Ukraine invasion. So far Anonymous says that it hacked the Russian Ministry of Defense database and various state-operated television channels in Russia. Additionally, a spokesperson from Russia Today (RT) said that after Anonymous’ recent statement, RT websites were […]
Solana reportedly went offline for four hours on Jan. 4, however Solana.Status shows there have been no issues on the network.
The Solana blockchain has suffered a third incident in just a few months that clogged the network and caused transactions to fail, with users debating whether it was caused by another DDos attack or if it was just network issues.
The scale and nature of the incident is hard to ascertain, with Coinbase, Wu Blockchain and Redditors reporting there had been an incident causing the network to slow and transactions to fail. However Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied there had been a DDoS on this occasion.
The latest incident comes less than a month after a previous attack which saw reports the network was clogged with mass botting due to another Initial DEX offering (IDO) on Solana-based decentralized exchange platform Radium.
According to Wu Blockchain, the Solana network went down for around four hours in the early morning of Jan. 4 UTC time as a result of an apparent DDoS attack. Solana.Status shows the network has been fully operational with 100% uptime over that period.
Solana went down again at two o'clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Telegram community, the attacker is suspected of using spam to conduct a DDoS attack.
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) January 4, 2022
A post on the r/CryptoCurrency group on Reddit yesterday also shared several screenshots of Solana (SOL) users reporting issues with failed SOL transactions around the time of the potential DDoS and network downtime. Coinbase also provided an incident report over the past 24 hours on the Solana network’s “degraded performance” that resulted in failed withdrawals of SOL on the crypto exchange.
“This is why you don't use a service's own status page to come to conclusions especially if it masquerades as a decentralized blockchain, but in reality is just a glorified database,” user u/Set1Less wrote.
But other users responding to the r/CryptoCurrency post in the r/Solana community questioned the validity of the claims, with “NiftyMufti” stating that:
“So instead of echoing random people's opinions, why don't you show the charts? A DDoS attack and downtime would have shown in the block explorers. I see no such signs. Prove me wrong. Which hours in which timezone was this supposed to have taken place?”
Solana Labs co-founder Yakovenko echoed as such on Twitter earlier today, noting that the network issues weren’t related to a DDoS, and were just the “pain of getting a new runtime commercialized.”
it's not a ddos, just pain of getting a new runtime commercialized.
— anat◎ly (@aeyakovenko) January 4, 2022
$ solana ping
--- transaction statistics ---
8 transactions submitted, 8 transactions confirmed, 0.0% transaction loss
confirmation min/mean/max/stddev = 2119/3934/9387/2415 ms
In a separate Twitter thread, Yakovenko also stated that the “cost model for compute is still a [little] wonky, real fix to deal with this is in 1.9, where TXs have to specify all the resources they use upfront.”
Related: Top crypto winners and losers of 2021
In an interview with Cointelegraph on Dec. 22, Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs said that developers are currently working to address the network’s issues, specifically in relation to improving transaction metering.
“Solana's runtime is a new design. It doesn't use EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] and a ton of innovation was done to ensure that users have the cheapest fees possible, but there's still work to be done on the runtime,” he said.
The attack comes just one week after a U.K. court ordered the website to stop hosting the Bitcoin white paper.
A website aiming to support the development of Bitcoin has reportedly been hit with a DDoS attack.
Cøbra, the pseudonymous owner of Bitcoin.org, reported on Twitter today that the website had been hit with an “absolutely massive” distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack along with a ransom demand for an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin (BTC). At time of publication, Bitcoin.org is still accessible.
“Back in the day you could put up a reasonable fight against most DDoS attacks,” said Cøbra. “Now they just down you at will. There is no ‘fight’ anymore, you go down and stay down until they leave you alone.”
https://t.co/OsFgRFRRZb getting hit with an absolutely massive DDoS attack and a ransom demand to send Bitcoin or they'll continue.
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) July 5, 2021
I don't think I've been this offended in a while. Ungrateful scum.
While DDoS attacks have previously targeted major crypto exchanges, it seems somewhat unusual for attackers to go after a site like Bitcoin.org, which holds no information about funds or users, only open-source information on the BTC blockchain and the cryptocurrency. The website was the target of a similar DDoS attack in December, which resulted in users being unable to access the Bitcoin Core software for a few hours.
Last year, major DDoS attacks targeted Binance, OKEx and Bitfinex. At the time, CEO Changpeng Zhao claimed that the attack on Binance was undertaken by its competitors in an attempt to harm its reputation rather than steal funds.
Related: CZ Blames ‘Self-Perceived Competitors’ for New DDoS Attacks on Binance
This isn’t the first time the website has been in the news in recent weeks. Bitcoin.org has also been the target of legal threats from Craig Wright, the man who claims he created Bitcoin. Last week, a U.K. court ruled in favor of Wright claiming copyright infringement against Bitcoin.org for hosting the Bitcoin white paper — Cøbra did not mount a defense to the lawsuit.
"I didn’t show up because defending against nonsense is a waste of time,” the Bitcoin.org owner said at the time.
Following the court ruling, Bitcoin.org blocked access to download the Bitcoin Core software for any user with a U.K.-based IP address. The project has also removed any links to the Bitcoin white paper.
