What is DDOS attack that hindered Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump?
The technoking Elon Musk has reported that X, previously known as Twitter, was the target of a DDOS attack that disrupted his highly anticipated interview with Donald Trump.
What is DDOS attack that hindered Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump?
A highly anticipated interview on X between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was cut short by a DDOS attack, as confirmed by Musk himself.
Musk was set to interview Trump at 8 p.m. (5.30 a.m. IST) ahead of the US presidential election, marking the 78-year-old's return to the microblogging platform for the first time in a year.
On Monday night, just after the intended start time, the website showed that the page was "not available" to certain users, while many others appeared to have joined successfully.
In a post explaining the DDOS attack, Elon said, "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 concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and post the unedited version then and there" Musk added.
What is DDOS attack?
DDOS attack stands for Distributed Denial-of-Service.
It is a type of cyberattack where an overwhelming amount of traffic is sent to the website or server, causing it to slow down or even crash.
In this case, the attack targeted the platform that hosted the interview, making it difficult for users to see the live feed. The attack was most likely carried out by hackers looking to interrupt the high-profile conversation.
Following the huge blow, Norton, a cybersecurity firm, stated that DDOS is a type of attack that aims to disrupt the normal operations of a targeted server, service, or network by flooding it with internet traffic. "Overwhelmed by traffic, the server or network is unable to process routine requests, causing it to substantially slow down or crash completely."
How to prevent DDOS attacks
Since DDOS attacks are becoming more sophisticated and prevalent, here are some steps to help prevent DDOS attacks:
- Implement traffic filtering and monitoring
- Scale infrastructure and bandwidth
- Engage with DDOS protection services.
Thus, the incident has highlighted the growing threat of cyberattacks and the need for robust security measures to prevent such disruptions in the coming future.
