Cryptocurrency exchange EXMO, a British company was targeted in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. As a precautionary measure company has shut down its servers temporarily. The company also said in a notification that it suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack on February 15, when its website was offline for two hours.
EXMO’s spokesperson said that the previous DDoS assaults only affected the website but this attack is quite different from previous attacks due to its potency and capability to drive 30 GB of traffic per second affecting the whole network system, including the website, API, Websocket API, and exchange charts. The assault was combated with the help of DDoS protection Qurator and the company has also beefed up the security to avoid any further damage.
This was the second assault on the company in the last two months, on December 24, threat actors attacked the company and earned 5% of EXMO’s assets from their ‘hot’ wallets. Later, the company confirmed that it has suffered a loss of about $4 million in customer cryptocurrency; currently, there are no proofs to establish the motives behind both the attacks but it is suspected that due to the bitcoin price hit records high, threat actors tried to cash in on the higher value of the stolen assets.
EXMO released an update regarding the developments in an investigation wherein they mentioned, “Our team is currently developing a new infrastructure for hot wallets. Since each blockchain needs a separate server, the process will take some time, once deposits and withdrawals are available, you will have to generate a new wallet address in the ‘Wallet’ section of your account. Our investigation is ongoing, and we are taking all necessary and precautionary measures to prevent such incidents from reoccurring.”
The company was launched in 2013 and is headquartered in London. Due to Britain’s exit from the European Union, EXMO had chosen to establish their brand into new European bases as part of a contingency plan. The company was registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for a brief stint as a crypto asset business until July 9th, 2021, following a request submitted back in April 2020.
EXMO has expanded its reach outside the UK in a very short span of time and the company’s offices are in Kyiv, Barcelona, Moscow, and Istanbul.