USDT, the most capitalized stablecoin, has been under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. This is per a tweet by Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Tether, Paolo Ardoino. The June 18 post says that this is not the first time the company has been attacked. According to Ardoino,
“They tried it once”
The Tether executive said that a ransomware request was made by the attackers on the morning of June 18. The failure of the company to comply with the demands led to a mass DDOSes.
“On a normal day we have around 2k reqs/5 min The attack brought us to 8M reqs/5 min.”
Mitigation of The Attack
Ardoino added that the mitigation of the attack was made possible due to the fact that the main ASN that cloudflare recognizes is AS-CHOOPA, He further clarified that there were no losses suffered by Tether in the attack.
Austin Federa, the Head of Communications at Solana wanted to know if 8 million requests in minutes qualifies as a DDOS attack. Ardoino responded that a spike from 2ooo to 8 million should be considered an attack.
On what the attackers hoped to gain, since it wouldn’t have any effect on the USDT chain, the CTO said,
“Imagine a journalist that goes on http://tether.to website and sees error 502. They will go immediately: TETHER SITE IS NOT WORKING! TOLD YOU!”
Stablecoin Down
As reported by Cryptoinfowatch, a stablecoin by Terra, UST lost its peg to the USD a few weeks ago. Another stablecoin, MIM, lost its peg on June 18. These events have made market watchers and investors wary that more stablecoins may fail.
Hate to say it but… 🤦♂️ Good luck everybody. pic.twitter.com/OQ9gIpMPkH
— Mathew (@MathewwithnoT) June 18, 2022
USDT, unlike the failed UST, is backed by a reserve of USD. Tether, the company behind the stablecoin has maintained that all coins they issue are redeemable for the dollar.
As the most capitalized stablecoin, the stability of USDT is essential to the overall health of the industry.
