BitMEX chief technology officer Samuel Reed explained the platform has been under attack from multiple botnet vectors since the month of February.

According to a series of tweets published on Monday, Reed responded to concerned clients over the exchange’s reported $1.2 billion worth of liquidations that occurred last week during bitcoin’s price drop. While BTC plummetted to $4,000 on Mar. 12, suffering its worst day of losses in seven years, whales were reportedly dumping on BitMEX and contributing to the downward spiral. 

Reed revealed in a tweet that BitMEX underwent two botnet  Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Mar. 13 from a network that had been probing the exchange for “some time.” Reed says the same botnet was responsible for an attack that occurred on Feb. 15.

According to Reed, the February attack was absorbed by normal DDoS protection, which prevented any downtime from occurring. However, the botnet was able to find a flaw in its AWS servers on Mar. 13, allowing attackers to gain access to an “endpoint” that was consistently slow. 

Reed’s tweets went on to provide an explanation for how the exchange was able to fix the vulnerability and promised to give more updates via blog posts in the coming days.

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