StepN, the successful Move-to-Earn of the moment, has been facing a lot of DDOS attacks this weekend, causing instability and then downtime of the application’s servers. At the time of writing, the technical team is still working on a solution to solve the problem as well as to prevent future attacks.
StepN suffers from numerous DDOS attacks
The Move-to-Earn StepN, which has been successful for a few months although still officially in beta phase, has suffered 2 sets of heavy DDOS attacks this weekend, to the point of crashing its servers.
“We have suffered multiple DDOS attacks over the past few hours. Securing the servers and recovery can take anywhere from 1-12 hours. We recommend that you rest during maintenance, otherwise workouts may not be recorded properly.”
A DDOS attack, also known as a denial of service attack, involves flooding servers with requests to congest them sometimes even to the point of being unusable.
According to StepN, servers faced 25 million simultaneous DDOS attacks on Saturday, June 4, causing disconnections among users who were mistakenly identified as bots.
Alongside these attacks, technical teams have implemented a new update aimed at stopping cheating by some users using bots to win tokens.
Second major attack the very next day
In order to compensate its users, StepN set up an exceptional reward program that was supposed to take place on Sunday, June 5, on a time slot during which those affected should have enjoyed doubled maximum energy (necessary to enjoy the rewards within the app).
However, the servers were attacked at the same time, to the point of bringing them down. Many users were unable to enjoy the momentary energy bonus, and did not fail to express their displeasure on Twitter.
It seems that the problem is still being solved by StepN’s maintenance teams, as no official statement informing of the return to normal has been published at the time of writing.
As a result of these tremors, StepN’s governance token, GMT, saw its price briefly drop to $0.91, the lowest of the week. It then recovered, with a current price of $1.05.
This is not a first for StepN, which faces the determination of hackers on a near-constant basis, who put the game’s servers to a severe test every month.