The cryptocurrency market has already been on the receiving end of some gruesome attacks over the years. If you can recall, such a recent attack was instigated on Solana, which made it go into temporary shutdown for at least 17 hours. This ambush was later called a Denial of Service (Dos) attack, an attempt to hack or make illegal inroads into a specific blockchain network.
DoS attacks have recently been common because the internet is mostly unprotected. Such reasons have contributed to the shift of the majority in these DoS attacks towards cryptocurrencies. Therefore, many people have already started to find ways to stop these DoS attacks from occurring frequently.
Everything You Need to Know about DoS Attacks
DoS attacks can be put in the same basket as cyber attacks, as both are done to halt a blockchain network temporarily. Users might be unable to access any information on their blockchain until this DoS attack gets resolved. Bitcoin is one of the common targets for DoS attacks because it is one of the largest blockchain networks to date.
During such DoS attacks, people trying to stop a single source might not be enough as it could lead to overloading of the system. Moreover, in such DoS attacks, it is difficult to identify the legitimate source of the attackers as thousands of transactions are simultaneously carried out on the network. It is not like DoS attacks will directly result in loss of data or profit for your blockchain, as time lost could play the ultimate role.
A botnet is a process followed by attackers trying to carry out this DoS attack on your blockchain network. Without the help of large sets of computers and engineering, this assault might not be possible.
Denial of Service Attack Damage on Bitcoin
While it is generally tough to attack decentralized systems, it’s important to provide a context and explain the reasons behind this difficulty. The question regarding how such attacks are still carried out remains to be answered because of decentralization. The chances of attacking any single source of Bitcoin remain zero, as every corner is protected individually.
However, DoS attacks are different, where blockchain networks could be easily targeted because of how they operate. Transaction flooding is the technique used by DoS attackers, which overloads the server, causing a temporary halt in its operations.
Most blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain can handle only a specific number of transactions, as anything above it could result in a slowdown of transactions. Henceforth, it could become quite challenging for Bitcoin to identify and separate legitimate transactions from malicious ones.
If such a thing doesn’t happen accurately, it will automatically fail the network, causing the whole blockchain to shut down until it is rectified.
Conclusion
Anything that starts to rise in popularity can cause people to strategize different ways to tumble down to nothingness. In such cases, DoS attacks on cryptocurrencies can serve as one of the prime examples. When the cryptocurrency ecosystem tries to stabilize itself with fewer price fluctuations, DoS attacks destroy every possibility of it. Therefore, DoS attacks could be fatal for Bitcoin.
