Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange BitMex reported last week that it had become the victim of yet another hacker attack amid the surge in market volatility in fiat and digital assets. Specifically, on Thursday, March 12, when the Bitcoin price crashed from $7,900 to as low as $3,600, recording its worst single-day drop in seven years the exchange experienced an aggressive DDoS attack when it went offline for around 25 minutes.
BitMEX’s chief technical officer Samuel Reed further revealed in a series of tweets that the exchange experienced ‘a botnet attack’ exposing flaws in its AWS servers. Reed added that botnet owners had access to “an endpoint that was consistently, reliably slow” and thus were able to carry out malicious activities on Mar 13 at both 02:15 UTC and 12:56 UTC. In the incident’s aftermath, Reed said the exchange was focused on rebuilding and recovering its system, having already identified the slow query and fixed it.
In essence, BitMEX is saying that a malicious party may have been able to manipulate its AWS servers, noting that the hackers were advanced, persistent and patient and had waited to collect a significant volume of data before executing the attack.