Attack of the bots! Paxful fights off thousands of automated threats

Bad actors allegedly tried to brute force their way into accounts belonging to Paxful’s users in an ongoing series of attacks.

Paxful, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency marketplace, has successfully defended against a number of serious threats, including 220,000 bot attacks and a variety of social engineering ploys — all in the span of two months.

During the same time period, hackers managed to steal around $200 million worth of cryptocurrency from the KuCoin exchange, and another unconnected attack saw $5.4 million stolen from Eterbase.

Paxful said that its alleged attackers attempted to use automated bots to brute force their way into accounts belonging to the project’s users:

“Bots, which are reported to generate about a quarter of global Web traffic, are de facto programs that emulate the actions of a real device for the purposes needed. They are a big headache for eCommerce businesses today, with cybercriminals using them to steal money, brute-force user credentials or carry out DDoS attacks.”

Global lockdown has presented criminals with a number of unique opportunities. Although not the biggest in terms of damage, the most publicized exploit of this nature was one perpetrated by a few teenagers who managed to hack some of Twitter’s biggest accounts.