Crypto exchange HTX is back up and running after a DDoS attack saw the site overloaded for an estimated 15 minutes Friday morning, HTX advisor Justin Sun announced Friday.

Sun says “all funds are SAFU”

“All services ofHtx.com have been restored,” Sun wrote in an early morning post on X. Thank you for your concern and support! All funds are SAFU!”

Known as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency notes such an attack “is accomplished by flooding the targeted host or network with traffic until the target cannot respond or simply crashes, preventing access for legitimate users.”

Denial-of-service attacks “can cost an organization both time and money while their resources and services are inaccessible.”

A tough year for HTX

News of Friday morning’s attack comes just months after HTX and its sister exchange, Poloniex, experienced a hacking attempt that drained a total of over $200 million from the exchanges.

“Since we have already covered all of the loss of tokens in the platform, on HTX and Poloniex, 100% of assets are 100% safe,“ Sun told crypto news platform, CoinDesk, in a December 2023 interview.

“Even though in terms of exchanges itself, we need to basically earn those profits in the future. But for customer assets, it’s 100% safe.”“The recent outflow represents a small fraction of our total reserves, and HTX remains in stable, healthy operation,” an HTX spokesperson told CoinDesk at the time.

This past March, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Sun for allegedly selling unregistered securities of his tokens Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT).

Moreover, Sun is accused of “wash trading” in order to successfully manipulate the market in his favor, as well as paying high-profile figures to advertise TRX and BTT without ever disclosing their compensation.

Celebrities who were charged by the SEC include actress Lindsay Lohan, professional boxer Jake Paul, rapper Lil Yachty, and more.

Changes in the crypto hacking landscape

HTX’s DDoS attack follows the Thursday release of a report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis that highlighted significant changes in the crypto hacking space.

In particular, illicit revenue from cryptocurrency hacking in 2023 is down by 54.3%.

“That dropoff could represent the reversal of a disturbing, long-term trend, and may signify that DeFi protocols are improving their security practices,” the Chainalysis report reads in part.

It remains to be seen what, if any, changes to security protocols HTX will make going forward.

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