10:54 AM
Paul B
The price of bitcoin dropped from an all time high of $147 on Wednesday to $132 after the largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, reported that they were the victims of a distributed denial of service attack that caused major slowing of their servers.
CNBC reported on the story calling the attack a "hacking" attack, but we all know that DDoS isn't really hacking. Anyway, this is from CNBC:
Online currency bitcoin had 20 percent knocked off its price overnight on Thursday as one of its major exchanges became the victim of a hacking attack leading to a sell-off in the virtual currency after reaching an all-time high.
...The most popular bitcoin exchange, Tokyo-based Mt.Gox announced overnight that it had been the victim of a hacking attack after experiencing a severe lag with its systems. The complications meant the price quickly sank to below $115 before regaining ground to $130 by 6.00 a.m. London time on Thursday, according to Bitcoincharts.com.I still can't stop laughing when I read the part about a "hacking attack". Seriously, performing a denial of service doesn't take much skill, and certainly shouldn't qualify as hacking.
If you are not familiar with Bitcoin, we talked about it the following episode of Tech Chop:
