Whodunnit?
Although the cause of the outages is unknown, experts believe they were the result of a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – a tactic in which a group of hackers work together on a system of devices to flood a site with spam traffic in order to overload it and prevent real users from gaining access. While it is unclear who is behind the outages, Musk stated that the attacks originated from Ukrainian IP addresses, which some take as a hint that he believes the attacks may have been planned by the Ukrainian government. However, the origins of traffic from DDoS attacks do not necessarily coordinate with the location of the attackers, and traffic from the X attack has since been traced to IP addresses in Brazil, Vietnam, and the U.S. as well. Musk commented:“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.”
DDos against DOGE
It is likely the attack was initiated by Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group with possible Russian ties, who has been known to target pro-Israel platforms in the past. The group took to Telegram on Monday to take credit for the outages, stating: “Twitter has been taken offline by Dark Storm Team.” Notably, Dark Storm refused to use the current name for X, instead choosing to refer to it as “Twitter.” Some see this as an act of defiance against Musk and his supposed overreach of power as the Head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But even if Dark Storm is responsible for the attack, that doesn’t mean the group is acting on its own. According to their Telegram, the hacktivist group markets themselves as “hackers for hire,” targeting sites on behalf of others for a profit. However, Dark Storm isn’t the only group taking credit for the attack. The hacker group Anonymous also took to X to claim responsibility for what they call “Operation Dreadnought,” stating:“We are here to fight against the Fascism that has taken root in America.”Although theoretically anyone could claim responsibility, Dark Storm does have some proof of their involvement. According to Forbes, “[t]he group… shared screenshots from Check Host, which is often used by DDoS attack groups to prove that an attack is happening as it illustrates site availability from multiple global servers.” Whoever the culprit is, it seems their motivations were rooted in personally attacking Musk and the DOGE team. The post Who is responsible for the latest X cyberattack? appeared first on OPUSfidelis.