Hacking collective Anonymous took credit for a Twitter outage early Monday, just weeks after the same group claimed responsibility for a massive disruption that disabled a swath of sites across the Web.
Twitter was rendered inoperable for approximately 30 minutes, during which it was impossible to use the messaging service both online and on mobile devices. New World Hackers, the Anonymous sect that claimed responsibility for an attack on New Hampshire-based Internet firm Dyn in October, also claimed responsibility for the latest outage, saying in a message to the Washington Examiner, “Twitter outage was us.”
Twitter did not reply to a request for comment. In a public message on Twitter, the group claimed it created the outage by using a distributed denial-of-service attack. Such DDoS assaults, which work by surreptitiously infecting thousands of individual devices and using them to redirect online traffic, are commonly used to crash servers for major online services.
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New World Hackers, which describes itself as a group based in Russia and contends it is generally at odds with both the United States and Russian government, said it was motivated to engage in the attack by a separate DDoS attack that temporarily disabled secret-leaking website WikiLeaks.
“Someone attacked WikiLeaks supposedly and it must have been people again WikiLeaks, I won’t state exactly who. We shot Twitter down and kind of got them to stop, but then they moved to WikiLeaks email servers and started DDoSing there,” the group said. “Our motive is just to warn as of today to stop messing with WikiLeaks just because they leak something that should be exposed.”
The organization has been active in this year’s political cycle. In earlier messages to the Examiner, the group contended the Russian government had obtained “access to the U.S election” by using platforms connected to Twitter. “They hacked into multiple websites that allow people to sign into Twitter to login/register. If you sign in, your information will be instantly logged,” the group said. That claim has not been independently verified.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security said in October that they were investigating “all potential causes” for the attack on Dyn, which disabled not only Twitter but also services such as PayPal, Spotify and NetFlix.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said after the announcement that “non-state actors” were likely behind the attack, but said he did not want to be “conclusively definitive” in the statement.
