Bitcoin Exchanges Suffer From Ddos Attacks

Two major bitcoin exchanges have temporarily halted withdrawals due to DDOs attacks. It concerns Bitstamp and BTC-e, both of which are located in Eastern Europe. Again there would be transaction irregularities just like with MtGox.

“We have suspended bitcoin withdrawals following inconsistent results across our bitcoin wallets caused by a transaction malleability denial-of-service attack,” Bitstamp wrote. BTC-e also says it is under fire lying down, but it is unknown whether there are also transaction problems there. Bitstamp says the attacks are related to a “misunderstanding” regarding bitcoin wallets and that there are “easy fixes that are now being implemented”.

This seems to indicate that Bitstamp also had not implemented any precautions against transaction malleability. This is a years old and well documented problem with bitcoin that now appears to be widely abused. At the end of last week, exchange MtGox stopped transactions, as it turned out on Monday because no protection against the transaction abuse was built in.

With the ddos ​​attacks, bitcoin fraudsters are causing confusion within the network, BlockChain.info’s Andreas Antonopoulos explains to CoinDesk: “When transactions are created, malformed and simultaneous transactions are also created.” If this happens on a large scale, the abuse of the transaction malleability problem will not be noticed. Properly written wallet software should easily handle the consequences of the problem, leaving not every exchange vulnerable to abuse.