On Tuesday night, the Cardano network experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, an attempt characterized by a significant increase in malicious activity aimed at disrupting its operations. However, the robust blockchain mechanisms effectively mitigated the attack, ensuring continued stability and operation.
Cardano not affected by DDoS attack
According to @ElRaulito_cnft, CTO of Fluid Token, the attack started at block 10,487,530 and each transaction executed a remarkable 194 REWARD smart contracts and spent 0.9 ADA per transaction. This strategy was intended to overload the network by filling each block with these complex transactions, with the goal of creating lag and degrading network performance.This way, they can send large transactions while spending the least amount possible.”, @ElRaulito_cnft x.com/ElRaulito_cnft/status/1805654707378983353″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>explained.
Philip Disarro, founder of Cardano development company Anastasia, presumably x.com/phil_uplc/status/1805672403822870776″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>juice a fundamental role in neutralizing the threat. Disarro's prompt public response about x appears to have influenced the attacker's decision to cease his activities.
“DDOSer stopped his attack after reading my tweet in an effort to protect his funds. Unfortunately, he arrived too late and the looting of his funds is already underway. Thanks for the free money idiot. “It is truly iconic that the attacker who presumably wanted to harm the ecosystem actually ended up donating to the open source smart contract development work we do at Anastasia Labs and funding Midgard,” Disarro explained via x.
The Cardano community closely followed the situation as it developed. Big Pey, a prominent content creator within the Cardano ecosystem, x.com/bigpeyYT/status/1805709926179766611″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>reassured the community via x, stating: “Someone tried DDOS Cardano today. Almost nothing happened and the network did not fail. ADA is resilient.” This sentiment was echoed throughout the community, highlighting confidence in the network's stability and security measures.
Jason Matias, founder of The Art of Selling Art, visually described the impact of the DDoS attack on network operations. “This is what the DDoS attack on Cardano looks like right now. The gray gear icons are spam transactions that someone is sending, creating larger and more difficult blocks to process,” Matías noted, clarifying how transactions appeared visually within network monitoring tools.
Cardano's use of the extended unspent transaction output (eUTxO) model was instrumental in mitigating the impact of the DDoS attack. This model differs significantly from the account-based models used by other major blockchains such as ethereum. In the eUTxO model, each transaction result contains not only a value but also a script that defines how the funds can then be used, allowing the protocol to handle each transaction result independently.
This architectural choice allows for better scalability and security as it prevents transactions from interfering with each other, thus isolating potential problems such as those introduced by the DDoS attack. Independent processing of each transaction ensures that malicious activity affecting one does not compromise the integrity of others, allowing the network to maintain high performance and reliability even under pressure.
Following the attack, the price of ADA was not affected. ADA price has risen 5% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $0.39.
Featured image created with DALL·E, chart from TradingView.com
