Steemit.com Experiences DDoS Attacks

Published on by Cryptoslate | Published on

The tokenized blogging front-end built on the Steem blockchain, Steemit, recently experienced sustained distributed denial of service attacks.

There was no reported impact on the Steem blockchain or any other apps associated with it.

A DDoS attack uses comprised computers to overwhelm a web service's servers.

By flooding a service's servers with messages, connection requests, and malformed data, an attacker can overwhelm a website's servers and force it to shut down, denying service to legitimate users.

Steemit was the first of many decentralized apps built on the Steem blockchain.

An engineering update, posted on the blockchain Mar. 14th by an official Steemit blog account, notes there have already been mitigation efforts implemented by the Steemit team and that the situation "Appears resolved." The report further states that the outages are unrelated to recent changes that were applied to Steemit.

This isn't the first time Steemit.com has experienced DDoS attacks.

Unlike past attacks, the blockchain-based social media front end is reportedly more capable of dealing with these kinds of attacks, making the recent outage all the more concerning.

"We've been trying hard to improve our communications which is why we've been putting out engineering updates every week. One challenge for us is that we have a lot of security concerns and many Steemit employees are extremely security conscious, and for good reason. Their obsession with security is what helps keep our users and our app developers safe."

Whatever the reason, it's likely DDoS attacks on crypto front-end web services will continue, and businesses providing these services should prepare themselves accordingly.

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