To answer the question in the title, apparently yes. Enough to put out a pretty well-orchestrated FUD campaign. Short because it was dismantled in under 24 hours, but still... enough to make some wonder, maybe, if they hold too much Bitcoin on the website, as opposed to other places?
That's a good question to ask, always, about any website and platform that manages crypto or money "in your name". But sometimes you have to wonder if alternatives are better, the same, or worse, in a crypto world that moves more and quicker toward centralization than we would have thought even last cycle.
Freebitco.in is one of the early players in the faucet world and it's a big one, now including casino-like features like betting, which probably became more important than the faucet aspect of the business. But they know how to attract savers too. After all, some of them will lose their BTC by gambling them away, but that's their problem.
At over 53m users, it's definitely a big player in the crypto world.
Now, it's likely many of these users are not active anymore on Freebitco.in. Some are probably not in crypto either after all this time. But still, we are talking about tens of millions of users, whereas crypto as a whole has a few hundred million people. So a good chunk of the people in crypto is or has been using Freebitco.in at some point.
What happened?
During the last 24 hours, we had this succession of events:
- the website went down without warning or any communication from the team
- in the meantime, a video was shared on X from a new account, sharing the alleged method they used to hack Freebitco.in, including the cleared huge withdrawal(s) to Binance - for anyone who doesn't like to question and check everything, this was a pretty good fake, enough to fuel the FUD
- after 18 hours, the freebitco.in team shared on X that this was a DDoS attack they have been fighting and that funds are safe.
Shortly after, the website went back online. - UPDATE: Looks like the website is still under DDoS attacks and is currently down again, as reported in the comments. Note: Don't make it worse by refreshing all the time!
- UPDATE 2: Problem solved.
Looks like I caught this tweet right after it was posted:
The interesting fact is, that if we are talking about DDoS attacks, they were well planned. I imagine the strongest one was at the beginning, which knocked out freebitco.in's website.
Then, active users of the website helped the attackers, by refreshing the site to see when it gets back online.
Then, the news started to spread and old users who hadn't logged in in a while probably wanted to see for themselves.
Then, the video with the hack was posted and amplified things.
Sounds like indeed they experienced a few waves of DDoS attacks started by the initial attackers and then amplified by the users themselves.
Would have helped if they communicated earlier about the DDoS attack and asked users to be patient and not to refresh all the time? Yes, with the DDoS attack. But users were worried about funds being lost, and I guess they wanted confirmation all funds were safe before saying anything. The period of silence didn't help.
Freebitco.in is still one of the only faucets I use and was curious what happened. It may be a good story with some things to learn from here.