X Outage Exposes Musk’s Poor Digital Hygiene | HackerNoon

Twitter/X had a massive outage on Monday morning EST, with Downdetector spikes surging;

In a post, Elon Musk has claimed this was due to a “massive cyberattack” against X.

Mashable seem skeptical of Elon, citing the lack of evidence in Musk’s reporting, alongside his prior claim that Trump suffered an attack in August, 2024 – which X employees said was untrue, corroborated via The Verge.

Though we’re unsure if ‘skeptical’ is fair, given Elon is Twitter’s biggest misinformation spreader according to both Reuters and his own AI, Grok;

This could be an attack squarely designed to rustle Elon’s jimmies considering the recent spate of vandalism against Musk’s Tesla. (The Guardian, CNN, News.com, The Washington Post), or it could have some other malicious intent.

Given the recent DOGE site vulnerabilities, and his evident de-prioritization of transparency reporting at Twitter/X – Musk is developing a reputation for poor digital hygiene, and relaxed security practices.

Did The Twitter / X Outage Leak Data?

Given DOGE’s digital track record, cost-cutting focus, and lack of transparency – this cyberattack should post considerable concerns for anyone on Twitter / X. Lets understand why;

1. Twitter/X is vulnerable to cyberattacks; it is likely bad actors will exploit the platform’s poor security for malicious purposes in future.
2. Potential for data breaches; No data leak has been reported this time; though Elon has not shared the root cause of the attack. There is a real potential that future attacks will involve capturing user data.
3. Elon is controversial; As a billionaire-politician, Musk is a hugely polarizing figure; hacktivist groups may target X specifically due to Elon’s ownership of the platform.
4. Twitter had a data breach in 2023; the probability of this happening again will only increase as more groups and individuals target X. 200 million email addresses were leaked.

While we hope you are not impacted directly by the security practices at Twitter – we wouldn’t recommend risking your data in future attacks and data breaches. You can secure your Twitter profile easily, and for free in a few basic steps.

How to Secure Your Twitter/X Profile

The most secure Twitter profile is probably the one that doesn’t exist… but, if you need to be on the platform, we recommend;

1. Review your account history, and delete all old content, or content with any personal information. You can set up targeted mass deletion with our app – just download Redact and follow the steps here.
2. We recommend requesting your data from Twitter, so you have a local copy.
3. Alias as much personal information attached to your account as possible, and set a totally unique password; in the event of a data breach, you don’t want important emails or passwords leaked.
4. Consider deleting your account altogether. We’d recommend working through the steps above before you do this.

While Twitter / X cyberattacks are worrying, if you take the proper steps you can mitigate the potential damage this does to you.