Lots Of Major Bitcoin Exchanges Are Under A 'Concerted And Massive Attack' Right Now

[FarCenter]

Andreas Antonopolous is chief security officer at Blockchain.info, a popular Bitcoin wallet service, and he tells CoinDesk that numerous Bitcoin exchanges are experiencing a "massive and concerted" denial of service attack right now.
This is a type of attack on one's digital real estate in which nefarious hackers bombard servers with junk requests over and over until they become useless. It's akin to filling a glass of water until it overflows.

In Antonopolous' words: "As [Bitcoin] transactions are being created, malformed/parallel transactions are also being created so as to create a fog of confusion over the entire network, which then affects almost every single implementation out there."

In other (simpler) words: this attack may cause Bitcoin to behave weirdly.

He added that no money has actually been lost, as exchanges halt withdrawals as needed in order to keep everything synchronized. One exchange affected by the attack, Bitstamp, sent an email to its customers to that effect.

Antonopolous predicts things will be operating normally in between one and three days.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-exchanges-under-attack-2014-2

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-exchanges-under-attack-2014-2

[tridim]

1. All pyramid schemes tend to fall apart eventually.

When the exchanges go back online the people who run them can set the exchange rate to whatever they want. Genius!

[RedstDem]

2. the bankers dont like bitcoin on their turf

they will pull all the stops to kill it off.

[Laelth]

3. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[arely staircase]

4. virtual money for real idiots

who didn't see this coming?

[FarCenter]

5. Libertarians always draw the wrong conclusion from the Internet

A decentralized, uncoordinated network only operates well if all of the parties behave predictably according to well defined rules. In other words, complete freedom is only possible if it is not used.

Rate-limiting State

The edge of the Internet is an unruly place

...

DDoS will continue to increase until the Internet is so congested that the benefit to an attacker of adding one more DDoS reaches the noise level, which means, until all of us including the attackers are drowning in noise. Alternatively, rate-limiting state can be added to every currently stateless protocol, service, and device on the Internet.

Paul Vixie, Farsight Security

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2578510