Anonymous Sudan Launches DDoS Attacks on Telegram After Channel Ban

Anonymous Sudan Launches DDoS Attacks on Telegram After Channel Ban

The hacker group Anonymous Sudan has launched a DDoS attack against Telegram after the platform blocked their main account. According to SOCRadar, the group’s attacks are usually motivated by political and religious reasons, but this particular DDoS attack on Telegram was triggered by the recent ban of their main channel. It appears the group is seeking revenge and trying to draw attention to the issue.

Anonymous Sudan first appeared in January 2023, announcing that they would target any country opposing Sudan. The group has targeted organizations and government institutions worldwide, carrying out DDoS attacks, hacks, and data leaks.

Since May 2023, the group has mainly attacked large organizations, demanding ransom payments to stop their DDoS attacks. Their initial targets included Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), after which they shifted focus to American companies such as Tinder, Lyft, and healthcare institutions across the United States.

The group gained significant notoriety for their DDoS attacks on Microsoft, which caused disruptions to Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and also affected the Microsoft Azure platform.

Later, at the end of August, Anonymous Sudan launched a large-scale DDoS attack on X (formerly Twitter), aiming to pressure Elon Musk into launching the Starlink service in Sudan. As a result, X experienced several hours of outages on August 29.

As mentioned earlier, the recent attack on Telegram was motivated by different reasons. While Telegram did not specify the exact reason for blocking the Anonymous Sudan channel, SOCRadar suggests the ban may have been related to the recent attack on X or a response to the use of bot accounts to artificially inflate the channel’s user count (which had over 120,000 members at the time of the ban).

Researchers note that this group is not connected to the original Anonymous Sudan hacktivists who appeared in Sudan in 2019, nor to the broader Anonymous hacktivist movement. However, some cybersecurity experts believe the group may be operating under a false flag and could actually be linked to Russia. These suspicions grew after the hackers announced the creation of a “DARKNET parliament” with other pro-Russian hacker groups, including Killnet and REvil, and later participated in an attack on the European Investment Bank (EIB).

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