During a conversation between billionaire Elon Musk and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Musk's social media platform X, technical issues occurred that Musk claimed were caused by a DDoS attack.
The discussion was significant since it was Trump's high-profile comeback to X following his 2021 Twitter ban in the wake of the Capitol rioting. In addition, Musk has been a big supporter of Trump as a candidate for the US presidency, thus inviting the former president to speak on his platform was a noteworthy choice that drew attention.
What unfolded during the interview?
Less than 20 minutes into the much-anticipated interview, Musk announced that the social media site had been struck by a massive distributed denial of service attack.
DDoS is an assault on a platform that tries to bring it down by overloading it with too many enquiries in too short a time. Many of the queries are pointless because the goal is to drive excessive traffic to the platform, causing it to eventually fail.
L“There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” Musk posted on X on August 13 at 5:48 am IST.
He later confirmed this, promising that an unedited audio version will be available soon.
Who is behind the DDoS incident?
Palestinian rights 'hacktivists' took responsibility for the attack, claiming their boasts were a ploy to bolster their activism message.
“Rippersec is a pro-Palestine hacktivist group who conducts DDoS attacks motivated by geopolitical events,” digital security writer CyberKnow posted to X. “The group like many hacktivist groups also thrives off attention,' the writer warned, “making it easy for them to claim this to improve credibility and reputation.”
However, researchers from XLab, China's cybersecurity research and threat analysis department, claimed they had discovered solid evidence to the contrary, setting out their case for a proven DDoS attack in a report on Wednesday.
“We identified four Mirai botnet C2s (command and controllers) involved in the attack. Additionally, other attack groups also participated using methods like HTTP proxy attacks,” the firm's researchers reported in a blog post.
'Mirai' is a type of malicious code that converts internet-connected Linux-based devices into remotely controlled 'zombies' for a 'botnet' army.
In a 'HTTP proxy attack,' hackers intercept and modify online communication between sites, servers, and computers, either to steal confidential data or to change the content for a number of purposes.
“The attack lasted from 8:37am to 9:28am Beijing time [8:37–9:28pm Eastern],' XLab noted, 'which closely matches the delay durations in the start time of the interview. Our analysis indicates that the attack did occur,” their report summed it up.
As evidence of its findings, the firm shared screenshots of a social media channel called 'UglyBotnet' in which one anonymous user appeared to claim responsibility for the attack.
Has such an outage occurred before?
Rhis is not the first time that an X event has been disrupted by technical troubles. A Twitter Spaces event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May 2023 was delayed and had difficulties, which Musk blamed on "straining" systems.
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he began removing key teams and professionals who had kept the old social media network running. Many customers criticised his decision on the new platform's history of outages. Musk, in turn, criticised Twitter and its code stack for being "brittle.”