What Really Happened With the DDoS Attacks That Took Down X

The social network X suffered intermittent outages on Monday, a situation owner Elon Musk attributed to a “massive cyberattack.” Musk said in an initial X post that the attack was perpetrated by “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country.” In a post on Telegram, a pro-Palestinian group known as “Dark Storm Team” took credit for the attacks within a few hours. Later on Monday, though, Musk claimed in an interview on Fox Business Network that the attacks had come from Ukrainian IP addresses. Web traffic analysis experts who tracked the incident on Monday were quick to emphasize that the type of attacks X seemed to face—distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks—are launched by a coordinated army of computers, or a “botnet,” pummeling a target with junk traffic in an attempt to overwhelm and take down its systems. Botnets are typically dispersed around the world, generating traffic with geographically diverse IP addresses, and they can also include mechanisms that make it h ... Read full article.