Mt Gox faced 150,000 attacks per second, media report

Same thought. During such a massive attack, why not just go off-line. Pull the plug for awhile.

This wouldn't really accomplish anything. Once the 'plug' was 'reinserted', the attacks would continue. All it would serve to do would be to take the site offline for legitimate users.

As Frungy says, rejecting traffic from the attackers is the way to go.

While Mt Gox faced hacker attempts to steal bitcoins, the exchange also confronted massive DDoS attacks, crippling its systems, the newspaper said without naming its sources.

Just a small point of clarification here, but the DDoS attacks and the hacking attempts are one and the same thing, not two separate things. The oldest variation of this tactic dates back to Unix and was known as "smurfing". The system would overload and reboot, and during reboot software loads up in a preset order, BIOS first, then OS, then other software such as virus protection, etc. In simple terms this means that if you can force a reboot then the system is momentarily defenseless, but moments are all you need to insert some code that allows you to create a back door into the system.

What stuns me is that any half-way competent systems administrator would have are equipped a high-value target like this with flood protection that would identify the addresses that attacks were coming from and automatically reject any traffic from these sources. This is not a new trick, and only a complete newbie system administrator would be caught off guard by it. Also, most system administrators I know carry smartphones with them everywhere and can shut down the system remotely the moment they detect any unusual traffic that might indicate a hack in progress, and then rush into the office to reboot the system in off-line mode and repair any damage or restore from the latest set of back-ups.

Who was running this system?

gogogo,

As was huge portions of their customer database. Major media doesn't report on dox dumps to pastebins, but it will all surface eventually.

Why isn't this news story about the fact their source code was published to the internet last Friday.

Ironic how china and Russia both get a mention, but not in relation to the DOS attack, me thinks they both will have more to do with this story than restricting how bitcoin can be used.

Same thought. During such a massive attack, why not just go off-line. Pull the plug for awhile.

so they had 750,000 bitcoins in their highly secured HDD and hacker cut&pasted them somewhere else. They should have backup since everything is digital(sarcasm).