Bitcoin.org, an educational platform for trading in bitcoin, was hit by a cyberattack on Monday, which overloaded the site with traffic and prompted it to shut down.
To add insult to injury, attackers demanded 0.5 bitcoin, or $17,012, in ransom to stop their actions and restore the site’s operations, Decrypt reported.
The attack in question is called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, a specific kind of cyberattack that targets a site’s host and infrastructure by flooding the host with traffic it is unable to contain, prompting the system to fail.
The site’s pseudonymous operator, Cobra, described Monday’s attack on Twitter as “absolutely massive.”
At the same time, CoinDesk reported it was able to access Bitcoin.org without difficulty.
The attack comes less than a week after London’s High Court issued a default judgment against the site, because its operator Cobra decided not to appear in court, uneager to reveal its true identity. In the ruling the court stated that Bitcoin.org should stop hosting its copy of the Bitcoin white paper.
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