The group offers paid DDoS attacks.
This morning, X went down for an extended outage, leaving users unable to access the website for hours.
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When it popped back up, Elon Musk said the site had been hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk wrote. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”
A hacking collective on Telegram is now taking credit, though the organization’s track record doesn’t offer much proof that it has conducted the operations it has claimed to be behind.
The group is known as Dark Storm Team, which claims to have launched a number of DDoS attacks in support of Palestine. A number of those just so happen to match up with sites that have been previously hit by DDoS attacks by other hacking organizations.
On Feb. 11, the group said it was planning on launching a new series of DDoS attacks.
“We have finally returned. We will launch a cyber attack on the services and government websites of NATO countries, Israel, and the countries that support Israel. Expect us,” it wrote.
Dark Storm Team takes credit for X DDoS attack
Earlier today, the same account retweeted a post from @syposecure, which announced the attack and posted a screenshot of a Telegram channel.
“To anyone wondering why X (Twitter) was down, it was under attack by Dark Storm Team,” it wrote.
That screenshot is from the Telegram channel for Dark Storm Team, which first boasted of its efforts at 10:03am ET, around the time X outages started to pop up.
Telegram
Over the course of the next few hours, while X was still down, the Telegram channel shared links to coverage of the outage, though it has not provided definitive proof it was behind it.
The group has claimed credit for a number of other site outages on its Telegram channel, including for Interpol and the Israel Ministry of Defense. None of the outages were ever reported in the news, providing independent corroboration of Dark Storm Team’s efforts.
A number of the sites it claimed to have taken down were previously reported to have suffered DDoS attacks, like the Port of Haifa and Charles de Gaulle Airport in France.
On the Telegram channel, the group offers paid DDoS attacks, a service it continued to plug as the outage was ongoing, while also touting its alleged efforts.
“How are you elon musk ? I hope you liked our visit,” it wrote.
When asked for any independent proof it was behind the attack, a member of a Telegram group linked to Dark Storm Team told the Daily Dot, “Not your business.”
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