X outage: “X remains one of the most talked about platforms making it a typical target for hackers marking their own territory”

Yesterday, Elon Musk’s social media site X experienced three separate outages, which Musk attributed to a “massive cyberattack,” writes NBC News. The first outage occurred around 5:30 a.m. ET, followed by another at 9:30 a.m., and a third at 11:10 a.m.

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Thousands of users reported issues during these times. Musk suggested that the attack was highly coordinated, possibly involving a large group or a country. Experts believe the outages were consistent with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which overwhelms a site with traffic to knock it offline.

“X remains one of the most talked about platforms making it a typical target for hackers marking their own territory. All that can be done to future proof their networks is to continue to expect the unexpected and build even more robust DDoS protection layers.“ — Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET

Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET, says given the popularity of X, this isn’t a surprise, and not much can be done about it.

“X remains one of the most talked about platforms making it a typical target for hackers marking their own territory. All that can be done to future proof their networks is to continue to expect the unexpected and build even more robust DDoS protection layers,” he says.

“Cybercriminals attack from all angles and are incredibly fearless in their attempts. DDoS attacks are a clever way of targeting a company without having to hack into the mainframe and the perpetrators can remain largely anonymous. This makes it that much more difficult to protect from when the landscape is completely unknown apart from having generic DDoS protection. However, even with such protection, each year threat actors become better equipped and use even more IP addresses such as home IoT device to flood systems making it increasingly more difficult to protect from,” he added.

As per Platform monitor Downdetector there were over 1.6 M reports of problems with the social media site from users globally on Monday.

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“We’re not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” Musk said in an interview with the Fox Business channel.

However, experts are saying that Musk’s claim that the outage was caused by hackers in Ukraine is doubtful, according to BBC.