According to Elon Musk his X (previously known as Twitter) account was under attack by DDoS. On August 13, as netizens waited for a conversation between X head Elon Musk, and former president Donald Trump on X, they faced a technical glitch of about 40 minutes. The viewers complained that they were not able to start the X space. This incident brought into attention that the cyberattack DDoS is surfacing again. The glitch came just after Trump made a post on X that he will be coming live on X for an Fundraising campaign.
Decoding DDoS
But what is DDoS and how can it affect your social media or any online website? The DDoS attack can be defined as the Distributed Denial of Service which can disrupt traffic on a website on an online service. CheckPoint, which is a cybersecurity research company, explained that this is done by overburdening the targeted device with many requests, consuming the device’s capacity and rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests. These attacks can also impact multiple areas in your devices through a single attack. Also the impact of a DDoS attack can last for hours or even days.
DDoS back in town
The incident that took place on August 13, resulted in several netizens coming up with raging comments. In an X post a user wrote, “Spaces never work when it matters,”. In addition to this some commented that they were having issues while trying to open X. In response to this Musk posted a message blaming the technical failure, which “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.”
But how can you identify that your device is facing the attack? Here’s how you can identify that your device has been attacked by DDoS:
- If you see a surge in web traffic, coming all of a sudden from the same IP address or range you are using
- When you experience a slow or irregular network performance.
- Lastly if your website, online store, or other service suddenly goes offline.
How to stay safe
So, how can you stay safe from these attacks? Given below are some steps by which you can keep your device safe from DDoS attack:
- It is suggested that your devices should create a denial-of-service defense strategy to help identify, reduce and prevent DDoS attacks.
- Try to identify gaps in security
- You also need to assess potential threats to your device
- Try to update any protection software to make sure that it’s working correctly.
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