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The infamous hacking group Anonymous Sudan has successfully taken X (formerly Twitter) offline this week as part of a wider campaign to pressure the company CEO, Elon Musk, to extend Starlink to Sudan.
X was taken down on Tuesday for over two hours in over a dozen countries after it was hit by a DDoS attack, the weapon of choice for the threat group.
According to Downdetector reports, there were almost 20,000 outages at the time of the attack.
Anonymous Sudan launched the attack on the social media platform in an effort to push Elon Musk to offer Starlink in the threat group’s home country.
“Make our message reach to Elon Musk: ‘Open Starlink in Sudan’,” the group said on Telegram.
A spokesperson for Anonymous Sudan told the BBC via Telegram that it had brought the site down using huge amounts of traffic to stress its servers, a common, unsophisticated technique that is favoured by the group.
Musk’s Starlink service is a constellation of internet providing satellites that provide areas without internet access with coverage. The service at this stage is not available in Sudan, which has been suffering from poor internet coverage as a result of a civil war. The country reached close to no internet coverage back in April.
Anonymous Sudan is known for pushing for the resolution of issues in its country. The attack was also launched to help draw attention to the civil war. At this stage, Elon Musk, X, and Starlink have all remained quiet on the issue.
The threat group has launched attacks on a number of organisations within the last few days, first attacking French postal service company La Poste only hours prior to X, with the group expressing their excitement following their attack.
“We wanted to ruin [Emmanuel] Macron’s Day more, so we dropped all systems of La Poste,” the group wrote, referring to the nation’s president.
Following the X attack, Anonymous Sudan launched an attack against community-based fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own (Ao3).
“Archive of our Own, we downed you earlier today, enjoy part two,” referring to an attack on the site it launched back in July.
In the previous attack, Ao3 was taken down completely, with the group saying it was because the hackers were “against all forms of degeneracy, and the site is full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things,” it said in a post.
Ao3 has since said the site has returned to normal.
Some users are getting errors when attempting to access the site. We're looking into it!
— AO3 Status (@AO3_Status) August 30, 2023
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