Today, in the early morning hours, Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX, a leading crypto derivatives exchange, admitted that his service received 'questions and concerns' on why the platform went down twice during the last round of the crypto massacre. According to him, the BitMEX team is 'gathering the facts' and will explain what happened.
First details of the dramatic moments
Two hours after Mr. Hayes tweeted about the research, the Chief Technical Director of the platform, Samuel Reed, disclosed that BitMEX had suffered two attacks from one botnet. Thus, the service halted operations.
So here's what we know so far: on Mar 13 at both 02:15 UTC and 12:56 UTC, we came under attack from a botnet that appears to have been probing the system for some time. This botnet was also responsible for an attack on Feb 15.
— Samuel Reed (@STRML_) March 16, 2020
According to Mr. Reed, it was this botnet that attacked BitMEX one month ago. Though, in the previous case, the attack was mitigated by a DDoS-protection system. On March 13, the malefactors used a much more sophisticated strategy and managed to stop BitMEX's operations.
However, the director is sure that the BitMEX team is on the right track as it reconsiders the back-end of the platform:
We're making systemic changes on our backend to ensure this can't happen again, and re-reviewing older systems to simplify, de-couple, isolate, and improve performance
When latency costs too much
The recent bloody Bitcoin (BTC) price drop, according to the vast majority of analysts, correlated with the massive $700M liquidation of positions on BitMEX. It was only their halting of operations that saved the price of the orange coin from further free fall.
Immediately after the downtime, the BitMEX team announced that one of the cloud computation providers of the platform was facing 'hardware issues'. However, the situation had already affected markets so severely that soil for 'conspiracy theories' had already been sewn.
Arman Shirinyan
Alex Dovbnya
