Cyber Attackers Strike X

Uploaded on 2025-03-12 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, NEWS-Cybersecurity News, FREE TO VIEW

Elon Musk says that the social media platform X (previously called Twitter) has been cyber attacked and thousands of users in the UK and US reported outages. According to data from tracking website Downdetector at least than 40,000 users reported they could not access X throughout Monday 10th March,

Musk, who has owned X since late 2022, thinks the attack could continue. "There was (still is) a massive cyber attack against X," Musk said in a post on the platform. "We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources". He said that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved".

This happened after the outage monitor Downdetector said it had witnessed tens of thousands of messages from US users saying they had serious technical issues - there were thousands of UK outage reports from UK on Monday 10th March as well. Many users trying to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site during the outages, but couldn’t.

Musk has previously claimed that the platform has been targeted by DDoS attacks in an attempt to take a website offline by overwhelming it with Internet traffic. DDOS is typically used to cause a disruption, which also makes confirming the source of these types of attacks more difficult.

After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion the majority of employees left or were fired, raising concerns about whether staffing was in place to maintain the social media platform. In addition to unhappy ex-employees, ther are numerous others with the motivation to attack Elon Musk, not least others in US government agencies threatened by Musk's leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

There has been speculation about the involvement of cyber criminal groups in the attack on X and now a hacktivist group known as the ‘Dark Storm Team’ have claimed responsibility on their Telegram channel for the cyber attack against X.

The Dark Storm Team is a hacktivist group - a collective of activists that leverage cyber tactics to retaliate against foreign policy developments whilst targeting high-profile companies for maximum publicity. However, it should be noted that the group did not provide any evidence to bolster their claims.

The Dark Storm Team are known primarily for launching DDoS attacks and offers their services for hire. However, messages published on the group's Telegram channel suggest that the actors also have the tooling capability to engage in web defacement attacks where they take down the contents of a target website and replace this with messages that support their cause.

In expert comment, Craig Watt, Threat Intelligence Consultant at Quorum Cyber, said "The Dark Storm Team mainly target organisations within Israel and its allied states, such as the US, indicating that they are acting from a pro-Palestinian stance. If the group did indeed carry this attack against the X platform, there could be a likely explanation...

"Although not stated by the group, it is possible that the DDoS attack was a retaliation against the US government recently rejecting a plan outlined at an emergency Arab League Summit that was held in Cairo on the 4th March 2025. The Arab plan proposed reconstructing the Gaza Strip to allow Palestinian citizens to remain in the region and was designed to counter President Trump’s proposal for the US to take over Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

"With Elon Musk owning the X platform, as well as being a senior advisor to President Trump and the de facto head of DOGE - this could provide an explanation for why the Dark Storm Team, assuming that their claim is credible, attacked the social media giant." Watt concluded.

Image: Ideogram

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