A Japanese newspaper is reporting that during the spectacular collapse of the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange, the operation's servers were also suffering a large-scale DDOS attack.

The Yomiuri Shimbun's English-language Japan News reports that the attacks in early February reached 150,000 DDOS hits per second, “mostly from servers in the United States and Europe”.

Japan News notes that it doesn't require any special skill to launch a DDOS attack, citing Tetsutaro Uehara, a professor of information security at Ritsumeikan University: “DDoS attacks can be done without high-level hacking techniques.”

Referring to attacks on Slovenian Bitstamp and Canada's Flexcoin, Uehara said: “It is possible that copycats turned their eyes on other exchanges after weaknesses in Mt. Gox’s system were found.”

By February 10, Mt Gox threw its hands up in the air and suspended Bitcoin withdrawals. It later emerged that attackers had found a way to exploit the Mt Gox code to steal 850,000 Bitcoins worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Of the stolen Bitcoins, 750,000 belonged to customers and 100,000 were Mt Gox's own holdings.

Mt Gox is under investigation in the US and Japan. ®