Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CTO behind stablecoin and also an altcoin, USDT, confirmed that Tether website tether.io is currently subject to a DDOS attack. In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 18, the number of requests on the website increased from 2,000 to 8,000,000 every five minutes. The chart below shows the increase in demand.
Altcoin Tether is under attack
Ardoino confirmed that “the attack has now been mitigated.” However, they left the “under attack” mode enabled to mitigate further risk. According to Tether CTO, the additional security move “will not affect ability to use” according to Tether CTO. “I am in attack mode” is a feature of Cloudflare’s DNS management service that protects websites from DDOS attacks by forcing users to complete an additional step to access the website. For human users viewing the website via a standard web browser, this causes a delay of several seconds as the browser completes a javascript query.
If the browser fails to complete the query, the user may need to complete a captcha to reach the website. However, DDOS attacks are often carried out using remote servers that make requests to the website from outside of a browser. These methods fail the query request and are therefore discarded before reaching the server. Here, Cloudflare handles all excess demand by freeing up the website to handle tasks as usual.
Ardoino expected the weekend to be long
Ardoino also confirmed that the cause of the problem was that “it takes some time to set the autoscale”. Here he refers to the ability of the server behind the website to scale resources to cope with the unexpected increase in demand. “It will be a long weekend,” Paolo tweeted earlier on Saturday. However, he did not anticipate that the weekend would be long with an attack on Tether’s website.
Ardoino was mostly talking about price changes in the market. As we reported on Kriptokoin.com , last weekend started a major price correction for bitcoin, which fell from $29,000 to $23,000 by Monday. The next few days brought little joy for the bulls as BTC continued to depreciate and dropped to $20,000 several times.
Although the bulls initially defended this level, it seemed almost inevitable that they would give up. And indeed, on Saturday morning, the primary cryptocurrency dropped below its 2017 record of $20,000. BTC has continued to lose value over the past 24 hours, dropping to an 18-month low of $17,500. It resulted in over $600 million in liquidations on a daily scale. After a brief pump towards $19,500, the cryptocurrency pulled back once again and is currently around $1,000 lower. Its market cap took another hit and is now down to $350 billion.
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