Cloudflare yesterday began investigating an ongoing outage that was causing errors to appear on the company 's website and was ultimately due to a DDoS attack .
“We’re sorry… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect users , we can’t process your request at this time,” the error message said.
In a report added to the company's status page shortly afterwards, Cloudflare said it was looking into the issue.
See also: Sberbank Russia: Received a DDoS attack with 1 million requests per second
“www.cloudflare.com is experiencing issues. The Cloudflare Dashboard is accessible via dash.cloudflare.com and APIs, and all Cloudflare services are unaffected,” it said.
Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the problem
Anonymous Sudan hackers claimed to have carried out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Cloudflare, affecting the operation of its site.
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a form of cyberattack that aims to disrupt the services of a system or website, making it inaccessible to users. In essence, this attack causes an overload of the system's resources, making it unable to respond to user requests. Attackers in a DDoS attack typically use a network, known as a botnet, consisting of many computers. The attacker uses these computers to send a large volume of requests to the system they wish to “hit”.
See also: Cloudflare: Sees increase in hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks
Cloudflare confirmed that the outage was caused by a DDoS attack that only affected the website www.cloudflare.com, while other products and services remained operational. The company did not attribute the attack to a specific hacking group.
“Cloudflare experienced a DDoS attack that caused connectivity issues on www.cloudflare.com for a few minutes. This DDoS attack did not impact any services or product features provided by Cloudflare, and no customers were impacted by this incident,” a company spokesperson told BleepingComputer.
“The Cloudflare website is intentionally hosted on separate infrastructure and cannot interfere with Cloudflare services. To be clear, our website is fully operational“.
Anonymous Sudan hackers (also known as Storm-1359) also claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack that affected OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Wednesday. OpenAI has not yet attributed these DDoS attacks to any specific hacking group. However, Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying that the reason behind them is the company’s general bias towards the Israeli -Palestinian war. The group also confirmed the use of the SkyNet botnet in these attacks, which recently added support for application layer attacks or Layer 7 (L7) DDoS attacks.
Learn more: OpenAI: ChatGPT outages were due to a DDoS attack
Previously, the group had been linked to other similar attacks on Microsoft's Outlook.com, OneDrive, and Azure Portal.
While the group claims to target countries and organizations that oppose Sudan's interests, some analysts believe this acts as a cover and that the group is actually linked to Russia.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com
