Hackers Target X (Formerly Twitter), Want Elon Musk to Launch Starlink in Sudan
A hacking group known as “Anonymous Sudan” temporarily took down Twitter, now referred to as X, in more than a dozen countries on Tuesday morning, as reported by the BBC. Their motive: to exert pressure on Elon Musk to launch his Starlink satellite internet service in Sudan.
X experienced an outage lasting over two hours due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, affecting thousands of users. A DDoS attack involves overwhelming a server with excessive requests, rendering it inaccessible.
Downdetector, a site tracking service outages, registered nearly 20,000 outage reports from users in the US and the UK.
The hackers conveyed their message to Elon Musk via Telegram: “Application + Website + Internal System are all out of service. All of X (Twitter) is completely downed. Make our message reach to Elon Musk: Open Starlink in Sudan.”
X has not publicly acknowledged the disruption, and Elon Musk has not responded to requests to introduce his satellite internet service in Sudan.
‘Anonymous Sudan’ hacking group
The Anonymous Sudan hacking group has earned notoriety for its cyber attacks.
In a recent incident, the Anonymous Sudan group launched a DDoS attack on AO3 (Archive of Our Own), a nonprofit website for fan-created content, citing opposition to what they deemed “degeneracy” and the presence of LGBTQ+ and NSFW content on the site.
In early June, Microsoft’s flagship office suite experienced intermittent but significant service disruptions, impacting Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps, as well as their cloud computing platform. A mysterious hacktivist group claimed responsibility, attributing the disruptions to distributed denial-of-service attacks.
A Microsoft spokeswoman later confirmed that the group, self-identifying as “Anonymous Sudan,” was behind these attacks.
Some cybersecurity experts speculate that the group may have Russian affiliation. However, the BBC report added that the group’s key member shared his live location on the Telegram app and sent pictures of his Sudanese passport suggesting they are in Sudan.
Source : Hindustan Times
