National Telecommunications Agency says action was expected after X was blocked. System operations have been normalized.
(DW) The Federal Police (PF), the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) have been the target of cyber attacks that have caused instability in their systems in recent days.
The hackers’ actions followed the publication of decisions by STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes against the operation of the social network X in Brazil. According to Anatel, which is responsible for regulating the telecommunications sector in Brazil, the attacks were “expected”.
The agency said that it is a frequent target of actions of this kind, especially in circumstances that “involve sensitive issues”. Anatel detected attempts to take down its operating system on Friday (30/09), when the old Twitter started to be suspended in the country after an order from Moraes.
“After the STF’s decision to block X, the Agency observed an expected increase in these attacks, which caused momentary instabilities in its systems and networks,” it wrote. “In response, Anatel’s IT team acted continuously to mitigate the impacts and ensure the security of operations.”
The STF’s systems were the target last Thursday (29/08) of a so-called DDoS attack, when a website is overloaded with thousands of simultaneous accesses and is unable to operate. The day before, Moraes had given X 24 hours to appoint a representative in Brazil, under penalty of suspension of the platform.
The Court said that its systems were down for 10 minutes, but that there was no operational loss. “The court’s technical team acted quickly, taking the services offline and implementing new security layers, so that all access was normalized,” it said in a statement.
The Federal Police say they are investigating a cyber attack that caused instability in the corporation’s systems on Tuesday. “Access to services has already been restored and no compromise to the institution’s systems or data access has been detected,” it said.
As DW has shown, the dispute between the owner of X, Elon Musk, and Justice Alexandre de Moraes is gaining momentum. On Tuesday, Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink, backed down and decided to comply with the magistrate’s order to block access to the X platform in the country.
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