X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a significant service disruption on Monday due to a “massive cyberattack,” as confirmed by owner Elon Musk. The hacktivist group Dark Storm claimed responsibility, launching a series of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
Musk’s statement on X confirmed the attack’s severity:
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing…”
Dark Storm Telegram Post
Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian group active since 2023, has a history of targeting organizations in Israel, Europe, and the US. They publicized their DDoS attacks on their Telegram channel, providing links [1, 2] to check-host.net as evidence.
Check-host.net is a website frequently used to demonstrate the impact of DDoS attacks by showing website unavailability from various global servers. This tactic visually confirms the ongoing assault.
In response to the attack, X implemented DDoS protection from Cloudflare. This resulted in a CAPTCHA challenge for all website requests, a common security measure to filter out malicious traffic from suspicious IP addresses generating excessive requests. The help.x.com section now displays a Cloudflare CAPTCHA.
This incident shows the capabilities of hacktivist groups to disrupt major online platforms. The scale of the attack, requiring substantial resources, suggests a highly organized effort, potentially involving a nation-state actor or a large, well-coordinated group.
This attack is reminiscent of the 2024 Anonymous Sudan attacks, which targeted major tech companies like Cloudflare, Microsoft, and OpenAI, causing widespread service disruptions.
See our article on the Top 10 Ransomware Groups of 2024 for more information on the evolving threat landscape. Understanding these attacks is crucial for enterprise businesses to bolster their own cybersecurity defenses against similar threats.
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