Description

The pro-Palestinian hacktivist group Dark Storm has claimed responsibility for DDoS attacks that disrupted X (formerly Twitter) worldwide on Monday. The large-scale attack prompted X to activate Cloudflare’s DDoS protection to mitigate the impact. While Elon Musk, the owner of X, did not explicitly confirm that DDoS attacks were the cause, he acknowledged a "massive cyberattack." In a post on X, Musk suggested that a well-funded, coordinated group or even a nation-state could be involved. Dark Storm, which has previously targeted entities in Israel, Europe, and the U.S., shared screenshots on Telegram as proof of their involvement. They used Check-host.net, a website that verifies service availability, to demonstrate the outage. To counter the attack, Cloudflare implemented CAPTCHA challenges for suspicious traffic, restricting access from IPs generating excessive requests. Currently, X’s help section displays a Cloudflare verification page for all users. Hacktivist groups have repeatedly disrupted major tech platforms through botnets and low-cost hosting providers, overwhelming targets with traffic surges. A similar case in 2024 led to the U.S. indictment of two Sudanese brothers suspected of running Anonymous Sudan, which successfully attacked Microsoft, Cloudflare, and OpenAI. On March 11, Musk told Fox Business that the attack originated from IP addresses in Ukraine, though Dark Storm denied any connection. Threat actors often utilize compromised devices worldwide, making it difficult to pinpoint a single source. X has yet to confirm whether other countries were involved.