May 19, 2021
When Someone Tries to DDOS Cybersecurity Professionals
A couple of days ago, PrivacySwap’s web frontend was taken down by an attacker — we experienced a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. We did not announce this to the community at that time as we knew 100% that we would easily bring things under control and at no point were you, our users or your assets facing any threat.
The timing was somewhat weird in the sense that it was also the day which we planned to upgrade our servers and systems. The reason for the upgrade was actually due to the fact that we were gaining a lot of traction and we knew that we needed to keep up. Who knew that just before we were going to announce our upgrade, our web was mysteriously taken down.
Upon closer inspection, we detected very abnormal traffic on our web and we got right down to work. Just to put it out there, we were not afraid of our users’ funds getting stolen. This was absolutely not because we were being complacent, but because we are 100% sure of the inability of a DDoS or any sort of brute force attack to compromise our smart contracts. As a fun fact, some have roughly calculated that as a conservative estimate, it would take a supercomputer roughly 10.5 billion billion (yes, billions of billions) years to crack a single 256 bit private key. The next worry we had was the integrity of our server. Aside from being bombarded with lots of traffic, upon checking our servers, we found no intrusion and no backdoors. Your funds were 100% at absolutely every single point in time through this attack. You just had trouble accessing our web.
We worked very hard through half the day to mitigate the DDoS attack while performing our updates. The attack made things a little difficult and slow, but we finally completed it. And after we did, the attacker continued with his attack and upped his data transfers from 1.6 TB to about 3.2 TB.
Our upgrades to our servers and systems resulted in very robust security that is able to withstand a concurrent attack about three to four times heavier than what we were hit with.
Despite PrivacySwap garnering enough attention to be attacked by nefarious actors for ransom (yes, we were asked to pay but we simply will not give in to people like that because we knew we had the upper hand all along), and you, the #PArmy, will definitely be and stay safe (you were never in danger) with us on the forefront.
Feel free to reach out to us or even read up about us:
Web: https://PrivacySwap.finance
Telegram: https://t.me/PrivacySwap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PrivacySwap
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH9bH2LGSc9b4lCC62luUwg
