Bitcoin Privacy Wallet Wasabi Pushed Against Attack On Tor

The Bitcoin privacy wallet Wasabi pushed against an Attack on the Tor network which was a bug that took down a lot of Tor sites as we read more in our latest Bitcoin news.

Bitcoin privacy wallet Wasabi withstood the bug attack on the Tor network while most other sites crashed. All modern Onion addresses on the privacy browser network Tor, went offline yesterday after a bug held up the system which now seems to be a DDoS attack and the disruption caused plenty of users of the wallet to suffer connection issues. Roger Dingledine who is a Tor report said that the system overload exposed the bug which kept the network offline:

 “It appears that somebody made their own Tor implementation that fetches directory info in a very rude way”…a custom DDoS tool?”

Due to an implementation bug, v3 onion services were experiencing instability earlier today.
A bug fix is on the way.
Everything else in Tor works fine even when the consensus is a few hours old, and v3 onion services should too.👇

— The Tor Project (@torproject) January 10, 2021

Black marketplaces White House Market and Asean Market, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and 8chan, were among dozens of popular sites that were taken down. Wasabi which funnels the traffic through Tor said in a blog post that some of the users experienced connection issues as a result. All in all, Wasabi managed to go through the attack automatically even though it uses a modern v3 address which brought the sites offline:

 “Most of our users haven’t noticed any interruptions because Wasabi was able to recover automatically. There were a few users who encountered intermittent Tor connection issues. But in most of these cases, restarting the Tor client solved the problem.”

Wasabi Wallet tunnels the traffic via the Tor network in order to encrypt transactions. It connects the users to random p2p nodes using the platform to obscure transactions so that it is impossible to work out how the funds flow across blockchains. Wasabi wasn’t particularly hit with the bug because it has a fallback system that connects it with regular internet:

“This allows the user to continue to operate, even in unusual/offline onion backend conditions.”

The denial of service attacks are increasing and according to a report from cybersecurity company Kaspersky, DDoS attacks increased about three times in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the same quarter in 2019. Kim Crawley who is a cybersecurity expert said that the Tor sites are vulnerable because they are not able to use services like Cloudfire to mitigate the DDoS attacks.