X Under Attack"Who Was Really Behind The Musk Platform Outages?
www.forbes.com

... After the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, suffered multiple outages on March 10, Elon Musk was quick to pin the blame on a "massive cyberattack" and opined that either a "large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved." Now, a new prime suspect has emerged as the pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective known as Dark Storm claims responsibility for taking X down. How this ties in with Musk telling Larry Kudlow during a Fox Business Network interview that the attack had been traced to "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area" remains unclear.

Dark Storm, however, is known to use tactics that are very similar to a Russia-linked group called KillNet, which also had a history of attacking western targets, and Ukraine supporting organizations, before becoming a more mainstream attackers-for-hire service. Dark Storm itself was first observed in 2023 and has attacked NATO countries, Israel and the U.S. with large-scale DDoS campaigns as well as ransomware attacks. ...

Dark Storm claimed responsibility for the X cyberattack in its Telegram channel. "Twitter has been taken offline by Dark Storm Team," it posted using the old name for X as, one assumes, a sign of defiance against Musk. The group also 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. ...

What Really Happened With the DDoS Attacks That Took Down X
www.wired.com

... DDoS attacks are common, and virtually all modern internet services experience them regularly and must proactively defend themselves.

As Musk himself put it on Monday, "We get attacked every day." Why, then, did these DDoS attacks cause outages for X?

Musk said it was because "this was done with a lot of resources," but independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont and other analysts see evidence that some X origin servers, which respond to web requests, weren't properly secured behind the company's Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible.

As a result, attackers could target them directly.

X has since secured the servers. ...