Sudan-based hackers shut down Twitter for hours to grab Elon Musk's attention

In an attempt to grab the attention of the tech billionaire and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk, an Anonymous Sudan hacking group brought down X — formerly called Twitter — into a number of countries for hours to force the entrepreneur to provide Starlink satellite service for their war-torn country.

In a Telegram post, the hackers wrote: "Make our message reach to Elon Musk: 'Open Starlink in Sudan.'"

While speaking to a hacker group member on Telegram, it was revealed that Tuesday's attack flooded Elon Musk’s X's servers with huge amounts of traffic to take it offline — the same blunt and relatively unsophisticated hacking methods for which the group is known.

The website Downdetector received nearly 20,000 reports of outages logged by users in the US and the UK.

Hofa — a member of the hacking group — noted that the so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was targeted at raising awareness about the war in Sudan which is "making the internet very bad and it goes down quite often for us".

Despite the attack, Musk’s company has not yet confirmed the outage.

No backing from Russia

The hacking group Anonymous Sudan is regarded as an alleged gang associated with a Russian cyber-military unit tasked to cause chaos in cyberspace Moscow.

The allegations are backed by the group's apparent support for Russian President Vladimir Putin — who has been recently accused of assassinating Wagner Group Chief Yevgeny Prighozin in a plane crash outside Moscow — and alignment of motives with other hacking groups in the country.

However, according to BBC, the group denies association with Russia.

BBC report indicated that the members of the group sent pictures of their Sudanese passports and other screenshots suggesting they were in Sudan.

"Our long-term goal is to show the world that Sudanese people, although with limited capabilities, have very good skills in many different fields," said Crush.

The gang in June posted a message in support of the Russian government to end the mutiny led by Prighozin's Wagner.

Crush explained that "a similar thing happened to our country and Russians stood with us so we wanted to pay them back", referring to Russia's support for the Sudanese government as it fights the ongoing civil war.

He insisted that their group is made up of a "small number" of Sudanese hackers who are launching the attacks from the country in spite of regular internet outages.

Since its emergence, it has been able to cause disruptions in France, Nigeria, Israel and the US.