The price war on Bitcoin was intensified last week when the coin on BitMEX dropped to $ 3,600 and nearly $ 1.2 billion in long contracts were liquidated on the platform. Now, the exchange's CTO has revealed that the liquidations were caused by sophisticated botnet attacks that have been exploring the platform for days and were responsible for another attack last month.
In the middle of one of the bloodiest days on the crypto market, BitMEX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, suffered a 25-minute failure. The March 12 breakdown dropped Bitcoin's price to as low as $ 3,600. According to data from Datamish.com, nearly $ 1.2 billion in Bitcoin Long contracts were released on March 12.
Immediately after the event, rumors circulated in the crypto community about a possible manipulation of BitMEX, as many suspected that the exchange itself could have caused the failure to curb further price losses.
Although BitMEX responded quickly to the problem and assured its users that the failure was caused by hardware problems with its cloud service providers, few were convinced that the explanation was so simple.
And now the co-founder and CEO of the exchange, Arthur Hayes, commented on the topic for the first time and said that the BitMEX team has gathered the facts over the past three days and will address any concerns of the community in the following days.
BitMEX is the victim of botnet attacks for the second time
BitMEX technical director Samuel Reed said the exchange fell victim to a botnet at both 02:15 UTC and 12:56 UTC.
The first attack was resolved fairly quickly - headquarters registered the attack as a dying volume on the Amazon Elastic Block Store Service. Then he scanned the database and resumed service.
The second attack was also quickly resolved, but this time Bitmex correctly recognized that it was an attack and not a problem with the cloud. As the slow query was fixed, Reed noted that even greater security updates needed to be made.