Bitfinex Halts after Cyberattack

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex is closed for trading on Tuesday morning due to a cyberattack.

One of the world’s largest digital currency exchanges was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). This overwhelms a system with various virus-infected servers.

The company stated in their website that the previous outage was caused by issues with one of their infrastructure providers.

While Bitfinex is recovering, the attack caused extreme load on their platform.

The trading on the platform resumed as of 11 a.m. ET. Before Bitfinex announced the attack, Bitfinex said trading was paused while it underwent "unplanned maintenance."

A spokesperson for Bitfinex told a report, “The attack only impacted trading operations, and user accounts and their associated funds/account balances were not at risk at any point during the attack.”

In 2012, Bitfinex was founded as a peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange until it added support for other cryptocurrencies.

Bitfinex temporarily stopped trading in August 2016 after a hack that resulted in the theft of nearly 120,000 bitcoins, and in June 2017, hackers targeted the platform and other cryptocurrencies exchanges.

Security has also been an issue for other multiple global exchanges.

Tokyo-based Mt.Gox was the first high-profile hack. In 2014, it filed for bankruptcy and said it lost 750,000 of its users’ bitcoins and 100,000 of their own. At that time, Mt.Gox was the largest bitcoin exchange.

Meanwhile, in January of the current year, hackers stole about $500 million worth of a lesser-known cryptocurrency from Coincheck, a major Japanese exchange.

In December 2017, Youbit, a South Korean cryptocurrency lost 17 percent of its digital assets. Its parent Yapian later filed for bankruptcy.

The bitcoin stood on Wednesday at $7,615.21. It has a market cap of $0.13T, and supply of 17,078.150.

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