 "What is DDOS attack that delayed Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk?")
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has reported that X was the target of a “massive DDOS attack” that prevented his interview with former US President Donald Trump from airing.
In front of the November US presidential elections, Musk was scheduled to interview Trump on Monday night, marking the 78-year-old’s comeback to the microblogging site.
Soon after the scheduled start time of 8 pm Eastern Time (5.30 am IST), the website indicated that the page was “not available” for certain users, while over 115,000 people seemed to have joined successfully, as per NDTV.
The Tesla CEO stated that in the worst scenario, the platform would only permit a limited number of people to listen in real-time before posting the discussion online.
“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 said in a post as the interview missed its scheduled timing.
What is a DDOS attack?
DDOS attack stands for “Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack.”
The purpose of the malicious attack is to take a computer, website, or internet service offline, according to Sky News.
This is accomplished by sending an excessive number of requests to the target, filling its capacity and making it unable to reply to valid requests.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsA Microsoft support page says that although DDoS attacks are wide-reaching and target all sorts of industries some industries like gaming, e-commerce and telecommunications are targeted more than others.
According to cybersecurity company Fortinet, it’s a cybercrime.
As per an IT service management company, Cloudfare, this kind of attack uses numerous compromised computer systems as sources of attack flow.
Due to its dispersed nature, a DDoS attack is distinct from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Several distinct IP addresses, frequently those of botnet members, are the source of the criminal traffic.
This increases the difficulty of defending against an attack and allows the attackers to produce more malicious traffic than one system could produce on its own.
A site or service that is suddenly delayed or unavailable is the most visible sign of a denial-of-service attack (DDoS).
How common are such attacks?
The first known DDOS attack happened in 1996 when a SYN flood, a standard type of such attack, forced one of the oldest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Panix, offline for many days, according to News18.
The biggest hack ever happened to none other than Amazon Web Services (AWS) in February 2020, surpassing a previous hack on GitHub that happened two years earlier.
Ukraine has been under constant physical and cyber assault from 2022 to the present.
According to Netscout, 13,142,840 DDoS attacks were recorded in 2023 alone.
The latest technical glitch also reminds Musk of the chaotic beginning of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s candidature for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2023. The hour-long programme was silent multiple times, and thousands of viewers were either dropped or unable to connect.
Due to technical issues and a 25-minute delay, the event drew far fewer participants than the 500,000 who had originally tried to join and listen.
Trump made fun of DeSantis at the time on Truth Social, his own social media platform. “My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working (TRUTH!)” Trump posted, as per Sky News. “Yours does not.”
How to prevent DDOS attacks?
Since DDoS attacks are becoming more sophisticated and complex, their detection is challenging.
Compared to standard service problems, many attack symptoms like slowly loading webpages, might not be all that different.
An increase in internet traffic is also welcomed by many businesses, particularly those that are introducing new goods or services. This means that it’s not always viable to stop these kinds of attacks. An organisation should prepare a counterattack in case these attacks happen, explained News18.
Nevertheless, people should set up their routers and firewalls to reject forged traffic and make sure they are up-to-date on security upgrades.
What did Trump and Musk talk about?
After somewhat of a rocky start, Trump and Musk chatted on a variety of issues, with much of Trump’s responses mirroring some of the multitopic stem-winding that’s typical of his rallies and speeches.
That included anecdotes about his interactions with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as critiques on what both men characterised as Democrats’ failures in securing the US-Mexico border and tamping down crime in American cities, according to The Associated Press.
There was also a specific discussion of Harris, with both Trump and Musk warning of the direction into which they felt she would lead the US as president.
Much of the convivial back and forth sounded less like a newsmaker interview and more like a conversation between similarly-minded allies.
Musk endorsed Trump just after the assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally last month.
With inputs from agencies
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