Mt. Gox Servers Compromised – What Did We Learn?

If you have been following the headlines in the last one week, you’d know there have been 2 major security attacks on website and web services of popular trading companies.

Breach Incident #1: Mt. Gox Servers were Compromised with Massive DDOS Attacks

Mt. Gox is one of the world's largest bitcoin exchange that trades decentralized digital currency known as bitcoins.

  • What Happened: Trading platform couldn’t be accessed. The exchange was subjected to a massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on its Web servers.
  • The Impact: The attacks have caused its worst trading lags ever and caused error pages to be displayed to traders.

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Breach Incident #2: Instawallet was Hacked, and Bitcoin Wallet Database was Illegally Accessed

InstaWallet is an online system for instant money transfers between customers' accounts.

  • What Happened: Instawallet database was fraudulently accessed, and hackers have supposedly gained access to the private keys that authorize bitcoin transactions
  • The Impact: Instawallet has claimed bitcoins were stolen and its service is suspended indefinitely until it can develop an alternative database architecture

So, What Did We Learn From All This?

These were major security breaches leading to detrimental impact on the victim organizations. Security was breached, IT assets were compromised, and business services were interrupted with malicious intent.

Hard Learnt Lessons: We need to be more proactive in our preparation against security attacks, and reactive in thwarting threats.

  1. Know what’s happening on the network round the clock
  2. Monitor all servers, workstations, network devices and security systems 24x7.
  3. Prevent non-compliant services and processes from intruding into the corporate firewall.
  4. Gain real-time access to all system and device logs, correlate them in-memory for speedy and meaningful incident awareness.

  

Log management and security information and event management (SIEM) systems will help monitor, identify security events on your enterprise network. It helps you take preventive actions to mitigate security threats in real time.


It’s high time to start preparing your IT infrastructure to face security threats. If you need a solution right away, download SolarWinds Log & Event Manager for advanced and effective log management, real-time network event correlation, and log analysis.

Prevention is unquestionably better than cure..!!

Thwack - Symbolize TM, R, and C