BitMEX undergoes DDoS attacks

Last Friday, March 13, the BitMEX platform suffered two DDoS attacks.On March 17, the exchange issued a statement,According to it, all traders who suffered losses during the attacks received compensation.

BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes on the blogsaid that the botnet conducted a DDoS attack on BitMEX platforms. Soon, exchange experts discovered that this botnet was responsible for a similar but unsuccessful attack on February 15th.

Initially, the development team misdiagnosed the problem, believing it to be a hardware failure at the cloud provider.DDoS slowed down the processing of messages at the API level, delaying their processing.Once the DDoS attack was identified and stopped, the messages began to arrive without delay.In both cases, traffic filtering systems found and blocked the botnet, but it created a significant internal queue.Platform specialists cleared the queue manually in order to resume the system. 

As part of an internal investigation, the BitMEX team identified 156 accounts that were affected by the attackAccording to the statement, the exchange reimbursed users for losses – a total of 40,297 XBT was returned.

According to Hayes, the security of user data remains a top priority and he assures that sensitive data has not been compromised.A DDoS attack is not a hack, but an attempt to slow down a system by overloading it with requests.User data remains safe.