Cryptocurrency Exchange Attacked After Disrupting Services in Russia

Cryptocurrency exchange Currency.com was targeted by a denial of service (DDoS) attack shortly after announcing that it was ceasing to offer its services to users in Russia.

A DDoS attack usually occurs when a large number of coordinated devices happen to access a website at the same time. This attack makes the address overloaded and as a result, users are unable to access the site.

According to the company’s owner, Viktor Prokopenya, the attack was carried out by Russian hackers.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist. We’ve been attacked before, like all financial companies, but the scale of it was incredible: ten times more than we’ve seen,” he told The Sunday Times.

Russian Hackers Attacked Cryptocurrency Exchange

As the portal reported, minutes after the announcement that the exchange would stop offering its services in the country, there was a wave of death threats from Russians to the Currency.com call center staff. Then the platform suffered the DDoS attack.

But the company is not the first to be targeted by a cyber attack after condemning Russia’s war. After all, attacks of this type were also recorded against the Ministry of Defense and the financial sector of Ukraine.

IT’S It is possible that Currency.com was the first platform among the cryptocurrency giants to completely stop operations in the country.

Other platforms, such as Coinbase and Binance, instead of ceasing to offer services to Russians, started blocking accounts of sanctioned people and companies.

According to Binance, banning people from accessing cryptocurrencies would be contrary to why cryptocurrencies exist.

“However, we have taken the necessary measures against those who have been sanctioned. If the international community expands these sanctions further, we will also aggressively enforce them,” the platform said.

However, for Prokopenya, crypto platforms should put business aside in this case:

“Everyone in the financial community should do their best and take a principled stand. You have to denounce Russia’s actions in the strongest possible terms. This is not a political issue like Brexit or Trump; it’s a terrible war. There is no way to approve this.”

Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s Deputy Digital Minister, said:

“We welcome Currency.com’s decision to disable its services for Russians and encourage other cryptocurrency exchanges to do the same. We are communicating with several cryptocurrency exchanges. I know that some of them are also considering withdrawing from Russia.”