Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency has been hit by a series of denial of service attacks from an as of yet, unknown hacker group or individuals. The attacks came in the form of mutated lines of code infiltrated into the software that runs the cryptocurrency. This was confirmed by a spokesperson for its main trade organization.
It is now believed that these attacks are responsible for the number of issues and problems suffered by two exchanges which caused them to shut down temporarily and stop withdrawals of stored Bitcoins. This was also confirmed by the Bitcoin Foundation in a statement.
According to Jinyoung Lee Englund, “This is a denial-of-service attack. Whoever is doing this is not stealing coins, but is succeeding in preventing some transactions from confirming. It’s important to note that DoS attacks do not affect people’s bitcoin wallets or funds”.
Englund further added that a team of highly experienced software developers were working round the clock to fix this issue but that customers would not be able to use their stored Bitcoins while the fix was underway. These Bitcoins would appear to be frozen by the system as if “in transaction”.