Tether’s Paolo Ardoino, the CTO confirmed that the company’s website is dealing with a DDOS problem. The attack was triggered by a staggering increase in requests – from 2000 to over 8 million at an interval of 5 minutes. This incident took place on early June 18th morning. Ardoino said that the attack has been taken care of, but the company has left the “under attack mode” feature enabled to cut down on further risk. This additional move will enhance security but not hamper redemption, he added.
The abovementioned feature is an integral part of Cloudflare’s internet management service dealing exclusively with DNS attacks. It protects any website from DDOS related attacks and requires users to complete one more step to get to the website. For people who use a standard browser to view a website, this results in a delay of a few seconds. This is because the browser must complete a challenge step.
If the browser is not able to fulfil the challenge requirements, users will have to complete an extra captcha step to access the site. Very often, DDOS-type attacks are carried out using a remote server or many. These make requests to the site without using a browser. The requests usually fail a challenge requirement and get bounced before they reach a company server.
In such an instance, Cloudflare will handle excess requests and let the website in question function normally. Ardoino also said that the reason this issue cropped up because it takes time for an auto-scaling adjustment. By this, he indicates the server’s ability to handle a website while scaling up resources to cope with unexpected demands. According to him, it would be a long weekend, but it was not because he expected the website to be attacked.
