Users in the US, Canada, the UK, and other nations were impacted by Monday’s global outages on the well-known social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. Over 40,000 users reported having trouble using the platform on Monday; the issues began at 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time and continued all day.
Elon Musk, the owner, blamed these outages on a “massive cyberattack,” implying that IP addresses in the “Ukraine area” were the source of the attack. In a series of posts on X, he hinted to the involvement of a nation-state or huge group, stating that the attack was carried out with significant resources.
He wrote, “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a larger, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”
The pro-Palestinian cyberattack group The Dark Storm Team, which is renowned for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) operations, has reappeared after a period of inactivity, according to Check Point Research (CPR), a cyber threat research team. The organization mainly targets Western organizations, such as those in Israel, the United States, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults, which employ bots to overload devices or networks with traffic, caused at least three X outages on Monday, according to a Newsweek story.
The Dark Storm Team has successfully targeted vital infrastructure in the last month, including as the UAE’s Ministry of Defense, Israel’s Haifa Port, and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).
It was also mentioned that Monday’s hack on X was attributed to the hacker collective Dark Storm Team. The pro-Palestinian outfit was founded in 2023 and is well-known for its successful hacking of high-security systems and sophisticated cyberwarfare attacks.
Over the course of the day, many of users reported problems with X due to the outage; by late afternoon, services had been restored. Although the site is now operational again, questions still surround the security protocols in place to stop similar attacks in the future.
Elon Musk said that the attack on X was an attempt to quiet him after the social media site seemed to have recovered.
In response to Musk’s post about the “massive cyberattack against X” Hassan Sajwani posted that, “They want to silence you and this platform.” Musk replied saying “Yes”.
Musk has come under fire for cutting content moderation staff since he purchased the site with the purported goal of advancing free expression. Moreover, under his management, the platform has encountered technical difficulties and restored accounts belonging to Trump and right-wing conspiracy theories.
According to advocacy groups, Musk has come under fire for disseminating false information to his sizable internet following on X.
This instance demonstrates the increasing difficulties social media companies have protecting themselves from complex cyber threats, particularly when it is difficult to pinpoint assaults to certain people or geographical areas.
After Elon Musk claimed that X’s outage had connections to Ukraine, a cybersecurity expert advised against hastily “pointing the finger” at the nation.
Software security company Eset’s worldwide cybersecurity adviser, Jake Moore, expressed his confidence that the attack was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which employs numerous IP addresses to flood a server or website with traffic.
According to him, it would be “dangerous to point the finger” at Ukraine based only on the location of IP addresses.
