Bitfinex Halts Trading After Cyberattack

The world’s largest and most significant cryptocurrency exchange company Bitfinex halted its trading operations for a few hours on Tuesday morning owing to a cyberattack on their platform. Founded in the year 2012 in Hong Kong, Bitfinex are world leaders in providing services for digital currency traders and global liquidity providers.

Bitfinex is currently under extreme load. We are investigating the issue and will keep you all up to date as we learn more.

— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) June 5, 2018

The company’s trading platform was supposedly attacked with multiple viruses to bring the system to a shut down for a few hours. The halt in trading led to the Bitcoin prices falling by 2 percent. Bitfinex issued a statement on Twitter regarding the shutdown stating their servers being under extreme load, with investigation to the situation going on and the services to resume soon. The company’s platform was presumably attacked by Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS). DDoS attacks target the end system as well as other systems controlled by the hacker. The attack led to extreme load on the server, resulting in the company opting for a halt in trade.

Global exchange companies all over the world have been facing security and hacking threats time and again. Despite small and big businesses taking measures to prevent unexpected security threats, cybercriminals are stealing and snitching large volumes of data and money. A similar case of Bitfinex trading being suspended was reported in August 2016 where the hack led to a theft of 120,000 Bitcoins.

A Bitfinex spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the attack had affected only the trading business of the company whereas the user accounts and funds were perfectly safe. The trading resumed around 11am after the morning shut down and the company assured that the situation was being investigated and looked into for no further snag.

Tokyo’s Mt. Gox was the first high-profile hack when it filed for bankruptcy in 2014 and said it lost 750,000 of its users’ bitcoins and 100,000 of the exchange’s own. The company was the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time.