A pro-Russian hacker group attacks Twitter and Elon Musk links it to Ukraine

The social network X (Twitter) suffered a cyber attack yesterday that caused its service to crash in several countries, including Spain.

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An attack claimed by a pro-Russian and pro-Palestinian cybercriminal group

The cyberattack consisted of three distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, a process that consists of overloading a website by launching a multitude of requests to its servers in a very short time, overloading them and causing interruptions in service. The cybercriminal group Dark Storm Team has claimed responsibility for this attack, according to the American media Newsweek yesterday.

This is not the first time that this group of cybercriminals has done so. A year ago, it threatened a wave of cyberattacks on NATO countries, Israel and nations that support the Israeli cause. This group of hackers was created in 2023, the year in which Hamas launched its terrorist attack against Israel. According to a report by cybersecurity firm Orange Cyberdefense, Dark Storm Team is a pro-Palestinian group with ties to Russia that is dedicated to amplifying Russian "disinformation and propaganda campaigns in France."

In 2023 it claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack in France with a “Glory to Russia”

In September 2023, Dark Storm Team carried out a DDoS attack in France, about which the Techmonitor.ai website noted the following:

Dark Storm, for example, speaks in Russian on its Telegram channel and appears to engage in pro-Russian hacktivism campaigns such as those against Sweden and Denmark, which are known to be in relation to the war in Ukraine. One post on Dark Storm’s channel reads “Israel’s leading public transport [online] operator killed. Responsibility for the outage is taken by Bluenet Russia and The Dark Storm Team. Glory to Russia.”

Techmonitor.ai noted that "pro-Russian cybercriminals such as Anonymous Sudan or Dark Storm will seek to target or destabilise more of Moscow’s enemies." This does not appear to be the case for the Twitter owner, given his repeated criticism of Ukraine. The reason Dark Storm might have attacked Twitter is because of Musk's support for Israel.

Elon Musk links Ukraine to attack: why is this not credible?

However, yesterday Elon Musk linked Ukraine to this attack, claiming that it was carried out using IP addresses from the Ukraine area. The Twitter owner's claim is highly questionable. As Keeper Security explains, a DDoS attack is carried out through networks of computers infected with malware. This happens without the owners of those computers knowing. Requests are sent from a multitude of IP addresses that may be located in many countries, making it almost impossible to detect the origin of an attack of this type.

No hacking group capable of such an attack would be stupid enough to expose their own IP addresses. Musk's claim therefore deserves to be dismissed as false, and perhaps as an attempt to justify a possible suspension of the service provided by Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet connection service, to Ukraine, a service that is being paid for by the Polish government.

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Photo: TED Conference.