The Dark Storm hacktivist group claims to be behind DDoS attacks causing multiple X worldwide outages on Monday, leading the company to enable DDoS protections from Cloudflare.
While X owner Elon Musk did not specifically state that DDoS attacks were behind the outages, he did confirm that it was caused by a “massive cyberattack.”.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted on 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 is a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group that launched in 2023 and has previously targeted organizations in Israel, Europe, and the US.
Today, the group posted to their Telegram channel that they were conducting DDoS attacks against Twitter, sharing screenshots and links [1, 2] to the check-host.net site as proof of the attack.
Check-host.net is a website that allows visitors to check the availability of a website from different servers throughout the world. The website is commonly used during DDoS attacks to show that an attack is taking place.
X is now being protected by the DDoS-protection service Cloudflare, which shows a captcha when suspicious IP addresses connect to the site when a single IP address generates too many requests.
The help.x.com section of the site currently displays a Cloudflare captcha for all requests, as shown below.
Source: BleepingComputer
Hacktivists have demonstrated time and time again their ability to disrupt massive technology platforms using botnets and other resources.
In 2024, the United States indicted two Sudanese brothers for the suspected operation of the Anonymous Sudan hacktivist group.
Anonymous Sudan successfully took down the websites and APIs of some of the largest technology firms, including Cloudflare, Microsoft, and OpenAI, disrupting services for many worldwide.
Based on an analysis of 14M malicious actions, discover the top 10 MITRE ATT&CK techniques behind 93% of attacks and how to defend against them.
