X Outage Explained: What Is A DDoS Attack That Caused Day-Long Downtime?

X (formerly Twitter) suffered one of the biggest outages in history on Monday, making the social media platform unavailable for almost a day. Elon Musk later confirmed that X was hit by a massive cyberattack, which he claimed was done by “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country.” While Musk did not provide evidence of a cyberattack, experts believe X was hit by a distributed denial of service attack, popularly known as DDoS.

But what is a DDoS attack and how effective is it?

One of the highly advanced types of cyberattacks, a DDoS attack can compromise multiple devices to flood a target, such as a service, website, or server, with an overwhelming volume of traffic. So much so that the target’s resources are exhausted to a point where it becomes unstable, or worse, inaccessible to users. DDoS attacks are launched to often target bank servers, government websites, and platforms such as X that host the data of millions of users.

DDoS attacks are highly effective in bringing large servers or networks to a standstill as they use a sophisticated method of turning devices that can access the target into “bots” through malware infection. After the attack forms a botnet, the attacker gains access to these devices remotely through a centralised system, which prompts the botnet to send huge amounts of data or requests to the target. A high number of such requests overwhelms the resources, such as CPU, bandwidth, and memory of the target, causing it to slow down, crash, or even go kaput for hours.

“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,” Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at Slovakia-based cybersecurity firm ESET.

Moore added that the kind of protection existing systems use often fails to prevent DDoS attacks. “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 said.

How is a DDoS attack prevented?

After a DDoS attack is detected in servers or networks, firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) are reinforced with better efficiency. Other methods include employing rate limiting to control traffic surges and adopting content delivery networks (CDNs) to absorb excess traffic are also used.

What has X done to mitigate the attack?

Musk’s claim that X was hit by a series of DDoS attacks is not substantiated and given his history of making controversial statements, it is hard to tell if his social media platform actually suffered a cyberattack. However, he did say that X was tracing the origin of the cyberattack and that the services were restored.

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