Thursday has turned out to be somewhat of a more busy day for social Trading Platform eToro than usual. According to a company statement, the company's service has been under attack by a malicious group of attackers since 07:12 GMT. After numerous complaints by customers of the firm, a thorough statement has been provided by eToro's CEO, Yoni Assia.
"I am sure that by now, most of you are already aware of the fact that our platform was under attack by a malicious group of hackers. I realize that many of you may be frustrated, angry, or simply worried following the unusual service interruptions that happened on Thursday, July 3rd and I wanted to contact you personally to apologize and explain what happened.
Since 07:12 GMT, July 3rd, eToro has been the target of a criminal DDoS Attack - a technique used by hackers to take an internet service offline by overloading its servers. (To read more about DDoS attacks:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack).
I believe the choice to attack today was not a random one, as both you and eToro have been gearing up for today for the better part of the week. We had everything in place for you to experience a great day of trading, with the NFP announcement. I speak for everyone at eToro when I say that we deeply regret that this experience was denied you.
We have robust systems in place to deal with such instances; however the scale of this particular attack caused our platform to experience significant downtime. All your personal data, including billing information, financial information and personal details is secure. More than that, throughout today we offered several alternatives for those of you who wanted to close a position, in order to give you as much control as was possible with regard to your portfolio.
The status right now is that we were successful in restoring all of our services. Regrettably, as with attacks such as this, we might see more interruptions in the next few days. It is my personal goal to make sure you receive the best experience possible and I guarantee that all of us here at eToro are working around the clock to make sure this is exactly what you get.
Our technical and service teams are at your disposal and are working non-stop to help each and every one of you resolve any issue affecting your personal account."
Update: On Friday morning in Europe, users have been reporting troubles with website and app functionality, and issues with logging in. Around 9BST, the status of the website was updated by the company, with eToro stating that currently it's up and running, despite still being under attack. According to a company spokesperson, the malicious attempts are now blocked before they can affect eToro's community.
