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Massive Cyberattack Allegedly Behind X Outages, Hacking Group Claims Responsibility

Suyukti

• 2 min read
Massive Cyberattack Allegedly Behind X Outages, Hacking Group Claims Responsibility
Photo by Shutter Speed / Unsplash

X (formerly Twitter) faced significant outages, with Elon Musk attributing them to a "massive cyberattack." The Dark Storm Team, a pro-Palestinian hacking group, claimed responsibility via Telegram. The attack caused disruptions for tens of thousands of users, with outages peaking throughout the morning. Musk speculated that a larger, coordinated group or nation-state could be behind the attack, though intermittent issues continued.

Comments:

Twitter yesterday had the largest Denial of service attacks. It shows even some of the largest websites on internet also could suffer denial of service attacks. Seems like west coast people did not suffer X outages.

DOS attacks are not easy to do attribution with. It can be done in a bunch of different ways. Here, they mentioned Bots.

Here is a basic look - Bot Coordinator which is basically some type of C2 instance and then a bunch of compromised assets (IoT devices etc). They start pushing mad amounts of data at the victim. Tracking backwards from the Botnet to who is the attacker is not easy.

Another example - is a Memcache attack : If there are misconfigured CDN servers (Content Delivery Network), Memcache servers etc, you can engage them by spoofing the return address and have them overwhelm the server. This is like an amplification attack technique.

So, DOS attacks need not be through bots only. Can also do a amplification attack.

This incident highlights the ongoing vulnerability of even major social media platforms to cyberattacks. The involvement of a pro-Palestinian group points to the rise of politically motivated cyberattacks, emphasizing the need for better protection against nation-state and hacktivist threats.

Suggested Guidelines:

  1. Enhance DDoS Mitigation: Implement stronger Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protections to prevent large-scale service disruptions.
  2. Monitor for Hacktivist Activity: Be aware of politically motivated attacks and bolster defenses against hacktivists.
  3. Improve Incident Response: Establish a rapid response plan to mitigate damage during cyberattacks.
  4. Collaboration with ISPs and CERTs: Work closely with Internet Service Providers and Computer Emergency Response Teams for swift attack mitigation.

Tags:

#Cyberattack #XOutages #DarkStormTeam #Hacktivism #Cybersecurity #DDoS #IncidentResponse

https://www.newsweek.com/x-twitter-outage-dark-storm-live-updates-2042333

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