#InstagramDown: Is China behind the US cyber attack? Anonymous sparks debate, internet blames Russia
In a suspicious mass attack, several online and communications services were down in the United States. With #InstagramDown trending on Twitter, there was an outpouring of reports saying it was a coordinated attack designed to disrupt all services, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and the popular game Fortnite.
After the issues persisted for several long hours, social media was concerned and the hacktivist group Anonymous alerted about it, saying, "The US is currently under a major DDoS attack." Who is behind these attacks? Speculating the source, Anonymous then tweeted: "The source of the DDoS attack on the United States is currently unknown. We speculate it may be China as the situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating."
On its Twitter account, the hacktivist group also shared proof from Digital Attack Map, which tracks the “top daily DDoS attacks worldwide”. What is a DDoS attack? Known as Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack, it is a cyber attack where the perpetrator makes a malicious attempt to disrupt traffic and deem network resources unavailable to its intended users by overloading the server or temporarily disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet.
Many couldn't believe it. "Bruh this map has no context. America has high volume traffic all the time and hosts how many Alexa top 100 sites? How does a country even get DDOS’d," one tweet said and another posted, "I believe there’s no target, but a test to see if this was possible by Russian Intelligence. If they can do this now they can do this 10-fold for the elections, and much more micro-targeted. Notice how a lot of the outages are coincidentally Majority Democrat-controlled regions?"
So who could be behind the attacks? After Anonymous tweeted China's links to it, many others had their own theories. "High probability that the DSoS attack(s) and massive lagging currently being experienced on Facebook, Instagram, and all major cell phone services is due to the White Rabbit Protocol that went LIVE today," one tweet said. Explaining what it is, another tweet read, "What is the White Rabbit Protocol? It is an extension of Ethernet. It theoretically should provide sub-nanosecond synchronization over networks. Basically the fastest communication possible, using quantum physics to transfer data."
Many still felt it could be Russia. "It is very clearly Russia. Over 4 million attacks detected in the last few hours," one tweet said. Another Twitter user wrote, "Why assume it’s only China? The U.S. government has been actively working to silence the protesting masses, Mark Zuckerborg has been assisting them. Isn’t it funny his platform is one 'under attack'." Another posted, "I got a feeling that today's DDoS attack was only a dry run, and that whoever orchestrated it was just probing how much traffic the mobile networks. We're going to see a lot of brazen cyberattacks of uncertain origin in the next few months, mark my words."