Largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, 'throttles' trading to tame price swings

April 22, 2013

The largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, is in a continuing battle with miscreants trying to manipulate the price of the virtual currency.Early Monday, Mt. Gox wrote on its Facebook page that it was once again struggling with a very large distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. The exchange said earlier this month it has been hit by attacks upwards of 80Gbps, which it believed were intended to swing bitcoin's price.The virtual currency can be bought on exchanges around the world. But Mt. Gox's market tends to set the price of bitcoin since it is has the highest volume of trades and users. Confidence in the bitcoin market is somewhat dependant on Mt. Gox's ability to keep its exchange running smoothly.Mt. Gox, based in Tokyo, said it was working hard to mitigate the attack and said it is close to implementing better defenses. The company already uses a Florida-based security firm called Prolexic that specializes in mitigating DDOS attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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