What is Dark Storm Team? Group of hackers claims responsibility for Musk's X (ex-Twitter) cyberattack
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, assured that the number of tools used in the cyberattack against his social network corresponds to a nation or a coordinated group.
Throughout Monday, the platform of X (formerly Twitter) experienced three major outages, with peaks of more than 40,000 crash reports according to Down Detector. Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of the company, suggested in a post that the attack could have been carried out by a state entity or a highly coordinated group.
Elon Musk spoke out about the attack through his own platform, ensuring that X is the target of daily attacks, but that this case was exceptional due to the amount of resources used. “It was a massive attack. Either it was done by a coordinated group with a large infrastructure or there is a country involved,” Musk wrote on X shortly after 1:30 p.m. m. ET.
Group of hackers claims responsibility for X cyberattack
After what happened, Musk went to his official X account to offer details about the alleged attack. While it did not provide technical specifics, it warned of the possible involvement of a nation-state, suggesting that the incident could be a large-scale strategic cyberattack. These types of offensives typically employ tactics such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, malware injection, or exploitation of vulnerabilities in key infrastructure.
Cyberattacks of this type are not new. In the past, actors such as China, Russia, and North Korea have been accused of being behind cyber espionage and digital sabotage campaigns against Western technology platforms. However, so far, there is no confirmation that the attack on X is linked to any particular nation. However, it should be noted that the Dark Storm Team group claimed responsibility for the cyberattack through a publication on Telegram.
Who is behind Dark Storm team?
Dark Storm Team is a hacking group that is known for carrying out “advanced cyber warfare tactics,” most recently linked to Hamas. The hacker collective announced that it would carry out a series of cyberattacks targeting government sites in Israel, as well as member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
According to international media, the hacker collective Dark Storm Team was founded in 2023. Since then, it has maintained pro-Palestine activities. Through Telegram, Dark Storm Team assured that the DDoS cyberattack that Elon Musk's X suffered this Monday, March 10, was carried out by them.
According to the hacker group, they claimed that they had successfully “disconnected Twitter”; To prove it, a screenshot of a real-time connectivity status page was shared showing failed connection attempts from multiple global locations. For his part, Elon Musk highlighted that X is attacked every day. However, the hack suffered on Monday occurred because “they used a lot of resources.”