News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another strong DDoS attack’.

Re:Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another... by foobarqux on Sunday April 21, 2013 @04:06PM (#5586207)
The recent repeated abuse of the term DDoS by ignorant members of the bitcoin community is misleading and confusing.

The first D in DDoS mean "distributed". There has never been any evidence of a distributed attack.

Server overload from heavy use of an application is not a DoS attack. A 37 transaction per second capacity suggests that MtGox simply cannot handle even moderate trading activity.

The frequent small trades that the exchange sometimes sees can reasonably be explained by bots trying to exploit the market in some way and not to attack availability of the exchange itself.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another... by Zidewinder on Sunday April 21, 2013 @04:23PM (#5586265)
At least some of these incidents appear to be actual DDoS attacks. It's true that Gox's trading engine sucks and is prone to lag during sudden spikes in activity, but many of these incidents have shut the whole service down very abruptly without any preceding increase in trading volume. Not to mention that they've released at least one Prolexic support ticket:

http://i.imgur.com/yPLufjj.png

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another... by fnordfnordfnord on Sunday April 21, 2013 @05:21PM (#5586450)
Most people don't know what a DoS or DDoS is outside technical circles; and it's become a bit of a joke in the Bitcoin community that every problem anyone encounters with MtGox or pretty much anything else can be attributed to a DDoS attack.

Re: Gox's transaction volume capacity, the market is begging for someone to come along and solve these problems.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox taken down for hours by ‘another... by eof on Sunday April 21, 2013 @05:14PM (#5586433)
It is clear you are following the situation as closely as those "ignorant members of the bitcoin community"; as MtGox themselves are calling these DDoS attacks and have reasonable proof of such.

It is also true that Gox's matching engine is .. uhh.. not upto snuff, but your accusation that 'ignorant members of the bitcoin community' are just calling everything a DDoS is in itself, quite ignorant.

[ Parent | on HN ]