To compel Elon Musk to bring his Starlink service to Sudan, a hacker group named Anonymous Sudan brought X (previously Twitter) down in over a dozen nations on Tuesday morning, August 29. The social media site was unavailable for almost two hours, impacting tens of thousands of people.
The hackers demanded through Telegram, "Make our message reach to Elon Musk: 'Open Starlink in Sudan.'"
Message to Elon Musk
The BBC spent many weeks having concealed chats with the gang using the Telegram messaging app to learn more about their techniques and motivations.
According to the BBC, a group member going by the name Crush said that the assault on Tuesday used the same basic and very primitive hacking tactics for which the organization is renowned.
Downdetector, an outage monitoring website, said about 20,000 outage complaints were reported by users in the United States and the United Kingdom amid the incident, with many individuals presumably being impacted.
Hofa, another member of the hacker gang, claimed the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) assault was meant to bring attention to the civil crisis in Sudan, which is "making the internet very bad and it goes down quite often for us."
Neither X nor Musk has commented on the delay in bringing their satellite internet service to Sudan.
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Debunking Speculation
Many in the cyber-security community believe that Anonymous Sudan is really a Russian cyber-military force trying to sow discord in the Kremlin's online networks while hiding their true identities. The group's online advocacy for Vladimir Putin and its apparent alignment of goals with other Russian cyber groups give rise to this supposition.
However, the criminal organization has disputed claims that it is Russian and has, for the first time, provided proof to the media that it is, in fact, based in Sudan.
The group's spokesman and driving force, Crush, provided confirmation by broadcasting his current location on the Telegram messaging service. Images of Crush and Hofa's Sudanese passports and other pictures strongly show they are now 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," Crush told BBC.
Despite frequent internet disruptions, he maintains that his organization is composed of a small number of hackers based in Sudan.
Anonymous Sudan first surfaced in January and has since effectively disrupted scores of organizations and government online sites in France, Nigeria, Israel, and the US. The group has been attacking Kenya for the last month, saying that the government there is "meddling in Sudanese affairs."
Crush added, "The reason we hit infrastructure is to teach the country and its rulers a lesson, and yes we have red lines, that is if our attacks harm a lot of innocents."
