The IT Nerd

It appears that Elon Musk was shockingly telling the truth about Twitter being under attack today. I say that because of this:

Using the hashtag #takedowntwitter (the site’s former name before Musk bought the platform in November 2022), a BlueSky user who goes by the name ‘Puck Arks’ posted that a pro-Palestinian hacker group known as the Dark Storm Team has laid claim to Monday morning’s interruptions.

“#DarkStorm has confirmed that the DDOS attack against Twitter will continue throughout the day as a protest against Musk and Trump,” they posted, stating the attacks are expected to last for at least another four hours.

Musk’s platform has been experiencing intermittent outages worldwide since about 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time, impacting roughly 40,000 users in the US at its 10:00 a.m. peak, and about 10,800 X users in the UK.

“Due to Elon Musks and Donald Trumps blatant fascism and lack of humanity we as a digital army for the people will continue our peaceful DDOS protests against X formerly known as Twitter. Thank you for your love and support, Puck Arks in said his third post addressing the outages.

So who is Dark Storm? Let me help you with that:

According to a cyber risk intelligence report by Security Scorecard from 2023, Dark Storm has been busy claiming attacks “on targets both inside Israel and out” focusing on taking down Israeli infrastructure and advertising its actions on its Teleram channel created in August 2023.

The group appears to follow a hacktivist playbook similar to the pro-Russian KillNet gang, which spent most of 2023 targeting victims with DDoS attacks in support of Ukraine, until it decided to commercialize its operations in favor of a hacker-for-hire model.

I would suspect that these attacks will be ongoing. And Elon will have to figure out how to deal with them. And this is on top of his other problems, like Tesla stock falling off a cliff, Tesla sales falling off a cliff, and protests outside Tesla stores. And I’m not even going cover his numerous personal problems with his “baby mammas” as that’s way too much drama. It truly seems that Elon has 99 problems at the moment. And his problems are likely to grow.

UPDATE: Roger Grimes, data-driven defense evangelist at cybersecurity company KnowBe4, commented:

“X was having widespread operational issues for over 8 hours. Even if it’s due to a massive cyberattack, service interruption for over 8 hours is unacceptable for a major platform. It’s the longest outage of a major platform I can remember in my over 36 year career, and there have been a lot of multi-hour outages.

“Every major platform knows it’s a target and plans accordingly. Certainly, such a major controversial platform has to have been planning for this. So the question is, “What went wrong? What did they not expect? What didn’t operate as expected?” The answer can’t be, “Well, this was just such a massive unexpected attack our response couldn’t handle it!” Nope. The answer has to be something that shows a mistake or an entirely new attack method the world isn’t aware of. Because users of the platform (and I’m one) and investors want to understand that it won’t happen again. And this isn’t the first time X has had operational issues. This is the first time it wasn’t self-inflicted. But now that X has been hit and taken down for basically a full day. how can they reassure users and investors that it won’t happen again?”  

Evan Dornbush, former NSA cybersecurity expert adds this:

  “Cybersecurity is not a cost, it is an investment. Preventing breaches, DDoS attacks, and other business impacts is more cost-effective than dealing with the inevitable, highly public, aftermath of one.

  “In this volatile employment market, there’s no shortage of highly talented and respected engineers who can help.”

UPDATE #2: Chris Hauk, Consumer Privacy Champion at Pixel Privacy, has provided the following comment:

“Small scale denial of service attacks like this are generally conducted by minor groups of hackers, as it is easier than ever to create a botnet for attacks like this. While the attacks may indeed be due to Musk’s recent actions, attacks on this scale generally do not come from major players, who do things on a much larger scale.”

Earlier today, Twitter was down. As in it wasn’t working for anyone. And this went on for hours. But in the last hour it came back up. And as I type this, it seems to be mostly working. Though its not completely stable. At the time I said that Twitter themselves had not said anything about the outage. But that changed with this:

Now, you have to take anything that Elon says with a grain of salt because he loves to play fast and loose with the truth. But let’s pretend that he’s telling the truth in this case. This is a massive escalation in terms of forms of protest against Elon. Besides that, a cyberattack against Twitter would not be beyond the realm of possibility. Specifically a DDoS or a Distributed Denial of Service attack which I think is what Elon is getting at in his Tweet. If that’s true, then the level of traffic that would have to be directed at Twitter to take them down should be easy to spot. Thus we’ll get to the bottom of Elon’s claims soon enough.

Needless to say, this is still potentially a developing story and updates are sure to come.

According to Down Detector, Twitter has been having issues since early this morning.

Whatever is going on, it’s being seen by users and has been going on since roughly 5:30 AM EST. Users have been left unable to log in to their accounts, meaning they also can’t post or view tweets on the platform. Those already logged in on the app and website have been presented the message: ‘Something went wrong, try reloading.’ I haven’t seen anything from Twitter on this. But you have to imagine that they will have to say something soon as this has been going on for a while.

Updates as they come.