Bitcoin Mining Pools Targeted in Wave of DDOS Attacks
AntPool, BW.com, NiceHash, CKPool and GHash.io are among a number of bitcoin mining pools and operations that have been hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks in recent days. The incidents appear to have begun in the first week of March. For example, on 11th March, AntPool owner Bitmain sent an email to customers disclosing the DDOS attacks and advising external pool users to set up failsafe pools in the event of an outage. According to many of the companies affected by the incidents, those behind the attacks demanded payment in bitcoin in return for stopping the attacks.....
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F2Pool, a Chinese mining pool also referred to as Discus Fish, which holds the largest share of the Bitcoin network’s hashrate at 26%, has been experiencing a series of extreme DDoS attacks. Behind the DDoS attack. The attacks began to target the F2Pool Bitcoin mining pool almost immediately after the F2Pool team announced their decision to “test” Bitcoin Classic by launching a subpool in which miners can mine Bitcoin Classic blocks. Peter Todd and other Bitcoin experts requested the hackers and the individuals behind the series of DDoS attacks to terminate them immediately, as they are....
A number of privacy-oriented email service providers have been targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) extortionists demanding payment in bitcoin. Hushmail, ProtonMail and Runbox, among other services, were targeted by an entity calling itself the Armada Collective. The group was the subject of a warning from earlier this fall by the Swiss Governmental Computer Emergency Response Team, a national agency dedicated to cybersecurity issues. Blog posts from the email providers indicate that the attacks took place between 3rd and 6th November. In the case of ProtonMail, the service....
Cryptsy, a Belize-based cryptocurrency and bitcoin derivatives exchange has been suffering from a series of extreme denial of service (DDoS) attacks, that have effectively disabled the site and bitcoin wallets since November 22. "Due to a server failure all wallets are paused. Will have them back online as quickly as possible. Website offline due to denial of service attack. We are working to mitigate," announced the Cryptsy team. Over the past few weeks, prominent bitcoin exchanges and payment processing platform including Kraken and OKCoin have been targeted with DDoS attacks of similar....
Distributed denial-of-service attacks have posed an increasingly severe problem for cryptocurrency exchanges and mining pools in recent weeks. Last month, several major pools in the mining community suffered debilitating DDoS attacks that resulted in significant delays, lost mining time and frustration for miners. In extreme cases, as explained by TeamDoge administrator Forrest Fuqua, some pools received ransom messages from hackers demanding payoffs in exchange for pulling back their attacks. Fuqua said that security flaws in the Mining Portal Open Source (MPOS) pool software commonly....
The cryptocoin universe is more than a little like the American west at the end of the 19th century. There are boomtowns like Paybase turning into real cities, ghost towns of defunct altcoin scams, and banditry is all too common. One form of banditry are attacks on mining pools, either by stealth or brute for DDoS. We know that this happens, but the nature of such conflict, as well as quantified fallout, are not well understood. When Bitcoin Mining Pools Run Dry (pdf) is a scholarly game theory paper on developing a model of mining pools in conflict. Scenarios Studied. The study examined....