Blockchain, the developer of the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet, suffered an outage this week after malicious actors breached the systems of its registrar and changed its DNS servers.
The company reported on Wednesday that it had detected a DNS issue. It later learned that attackers had compromised its DNS registrar.
In a blog post detailing the attack, Blockchain CEO and co-founder Peter Smith said the attackers changed the Blockchain.info DNS servers in an effort to direct users to a phishing website.
Fortunately, Blockchain and the compromised registrar acted quickly and the DNS changes propagated only partially across the Web. The company decided to shut down its entire platform to analyze the incident, but the investigation revealed that the cybercriminals had only gained access to the registrar’s systems.
The DNS settings were reverted and the platform was restored within roughly 8 hours. Blockchain says it has implemented additional controls to prevent such incidents in the future.
According to Smith, the phishing website leveraged a self-signed SSL certificate, which should have prevented people using modern browsers from being exposed. The phishing page was shut down after Blockchain notified the owner of the machine abused in the attack. However, it’s still possible that some users entered their credentials on the fake site.
Users reported on Reddit that the hackers changed Blockchain’s name servers from CloudFlare to Hostwinds, which claims to offer the cheapest website hosting in the industry.
Bitcoin’s high value has made it a tempting target for cybercriminals and many exchanges have reported being breached over the past months, including Bitfinex, Cavirtex, Bitstamp, Bter and BTC-E.
Bitcoin-related websites are targeted not only by profit-driven cybercriminals. In August, Bitcoin.org, the organization that oversees Bitcoin software development, warned users of possible state-sponsored attacks.
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