Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CTO, has confirmed that Tether’s website, tether.io, is currently under DDOS attack. Early in the morning of Saturday, June 18th, the number of website requests increased from 2,000 to 8,000,000 every 5 minutes. The graph below shows the increase in the number of requests.
Ardoino has confirmed that the attack has been mitigated, but “leaves” in attack mode “enabled” to further mitigate the risk. According to Tether CTO, additional security moves “do not affect redemption capacity,” Tether CTO said.
In attack mode
“I’m in attack mode” is a feature of Cloudflare’s DNS management service that protects your website from DDOS attacks by forcing users to take additional steps to access your website. For a human user viewing a website through a standard web browser, there is a delay of a few seconds before the browser completes the javascript challenge.
If the browser cannot complete the challenge, the user may need to complete the capture in order to access the website. However, DDOS attacks are often carried out using remote servers that send requests to websites from outside the browser.
These methods fail the challenge request and are kicked before reaching the server. Here, Cloudflare handles all the excess demand and gives the website the freedom to perform its tasks as usual. Ardoino also confirmed that the reason for this problem was “it takes some time to adjust the autoscale”. In it, he mentions the server’s ability behind websites to scale up resources to accommodate unexpected increases in demand.
Earlier on Saturday, Paolo tweeted, “It’s going to be a long weekend,” but it didn’t seem to be due to an attack on Tether’s website.
