UK cryptocurrency exchange EXMO suffers another DDoS attack

EXMO suffered its second distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in two months and says it is working to bring trading services back online as soon as possible

The UK-based cryptocurrency exchange EXMO has revealed it suffered a second distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in two months. The attack caused the exchange’s servers to go offline, but the admins assured traders they are working on restoring services.

In a tweet yesterday, EXMO revealed hackers targeted the exchange with a DDoS attack. This type of cyber-attack overloads a system with numerous requests from various virus-infected servers.

The exchange said, “Important: DDoS attack on EXMO. Please note the EXMO exchange website is now under the DDoS attack. The servers are temporarily unavailable. We are solving this issue right now. Please stay tuned”.

The attack comes two months after the cryptocurrency exchange reported that hackers stole 6% of its total assets. The hackers stole $10.5 million in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Tether (USDT) and Zcash (ZEC). Back then, the exchange had said, “Compromised due to the hack amount makes up around 6% of the company’s total assets. We don’t believe it could somehow affect a going concern basis for EXMO”.

The executives later revealed they couldn’t recover all the stolen funds because the hackers had withdrawn $1 million in XRP and $2.8 million in ZEC via the Poloniex exchange.

EXMO is yet to reveal if it suffered losses in the latest attack. The crypto exchange is yet to reveal details regarding the latest attack, but it has affected their stance in the cryptocurrency space. According to Coinmarketcap, EXMO’s total trading volume is down by nearly 5% over the past 24 hours.

Maria Stankevich, chief business development officer of EXMO, assured users the exchange had put in place various protocols to reduce the possibility of a future attack. Ledger’s custody arm is now in charge of cryptocurrency withdrawals on EXMO, and the exchange put in place a bug bounty program to test the platform’s security strength.

EXMO has received a temporary registration status from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. The regulatory body had notified all cryptocurrency exchanges operating in the country to register with them to verify that they comply with Anti-Money Laundering regulations.