Anonymous Sudan announced that the hacktivist group launched a test attack against PayPal. The PayPal cyber attack lasted 30 seconds, according to the Telegram message by Anonymous Sudan. The group posted that it will be targeting organizations in the United Arab Emirates and the United States as well.
PayPal cyber attack and threats
Anonymous Sudan was planning to launch a bigger cyber attack on PayPal. However, the hackers posted screenshots from the test PayPal cyber attack which allegedly had the online payment gateway display error messages for a time being.
The below screenshot was taken from the Telegram channel of Anonymous Sudan claiming the PayPal cyber attack.
The 30-second test attack against PayPal shown in the screenshot on July 17 fetched 107 reports. The report covered outages in the last 24hrs. It was titled, ‘User reports indicate problems at PayPal.’
The Cyber Express emailed PayPal to confirm the alleged cyber attack by Anonymous Sudan. We will update this report based on its response.
Claims of UAE cyber attacks by Anonymous Sudan
The hacktivist group has been teaming with other hacker groups to launch more cyber attacks against organizations. They are a pro-Sudan group that has allegedly targeted organizations in European nations, India, and the United States among others.
They claimed to launch cyber attacks on UAE-based organizations for their support for the Rapid Support forces. In the recent threats, Anonymous Sudan named a government portal of UAE including the Dubai Electricity and Water.
“Attack duration 5 hours,” the Telegram message claiming the UAE cyber attacks by Anonymous Sudan read. The group has previously named the Ministry of Interior among other UAE targets. However, the authenticity of the cyber attacks on the UAE was not confirmed.
Anonymous Sudan had claimed to join hands with KillNet, and Revil to launch massive cyber attacks to fight against anti-Islamic sentiments. The group has been known to launch layer 7 DDoS attack traffic that overwhelms the system with SSL/ TLS handshakes.
Their DDoS attacks circumvent the CDN layer and overload the servers. They also launch attacks that involve requesting a resource from the targeted system, but instead skip addressing the request resulting in the server leaving the connection open.
Anonymous Sudan has been speculated to be backed by Russian groups. “It is noteworthy that other Islamic groups acknowledge Anonymous Sudan as one of their own and share their posts. It is not uncommon for such underground groups to come together around common goals and interests,” a Falcon Feeds blog read.
The group has named Sweden, Denmark, France, Australia, and India among others as targets.
Previous PayPal security breach
Early this year in January, PayPal notified 35,000 users about credential stealing attacks using brute force to steal login data. Although, Alon Gal, Co-Founder and CTO at Hudson Rock speculated the number of impacted individuals to go above 1,350,000.
This was due to information-stealing malware and automated bots that were likely employed to steal usernames and passwords. Moreover, hackers used a combination of usernames and passwords available on the dark web.
PayPal confirmed a data leak on December 20, 2022, with the unauthorized access being maintained between December 6 to 8.