Anonymous Sudan hacks X to pressure Elon Musk into bringing Starlink to their country
Tuesday morning, a hacker group by the name of Anonymous Sudan attempted to pressure Elon Musk into launching his Starlink service in their country, by taking down X, formerly known as Twitter, in more than a dozen countries.
X was unavailable for more than two hours, affecting thousands of users.
The hackers wrote on Telegram, “Make our message reach Elon Musk: ‘Open Starlink in Sudan’.
X is the latest victim of the gang attacking to “benefit Sudan and Islam”.
The BBC had several weeks of private conversations with the group on the messaging app Telegram to learn more about the hackers’ techniques and goals.
The BBC was informed by a member of the group going by the name of Crush that the group’s well-known blunt and relatively simple hacking methods were used in Tuesday’s attack to flood X’s servers with a massive amount of traffic and knock it offline.
Nearly 20,000 outage reports were reported by users in the US and the UK, according to the outage-tracking website Downdetector, though a much larger number of people are likely to have been impacted.
The so-called DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, according to Hofa, a member of the hacking group, was carried out to draw attention to the civil war in Sudan, which is “making the internet very bad and it goes down quite often for us.”.
In addition to Mr. Musk not responding to inquiries about the launch of his satellite internet service in Sudan, X has not publicly acknowledged the disruption that was caused.
Source-BBC
