Increasing Threats to U.S. Tech

U.S. tech companies should prepare for increasingly sophisticated attacks from Dark Storm and allied hacktivist groups that may use service disruptions as diversions for more damaging operations like data theft or infrastructure sabotage.

Overview

On April 16, Zoom experienced a major global outage that lasted for nearly two hours, leaving users unable to access core services, including meetings, logins, and account verification. The issue began around 2:25 PM ET and was eventually resolved by 4:12 PM ET. According to Zoom’s internal report, the root cause was a domain block that occurred when GoDaddy Registry mistakenly disabled the zoom.us domain. This was due to a communication failure between GoDaddy and Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor. While Zoom emphasized that there was no product, security, or internal network compromise, the domain-level disruption alone was enough to cripple operations temporarily for millions of users. The outage was tracked live on Down Detector, which showed over 55,000 reports at its peak. Zoom eventually advised users still experiencing issues to flush their DNS cache to reestablish service. For organizations heavily reliant on Zoom for communications or collaboration, this outage represents a notable operational risk, particularly for remote or distributed teams.

During the disruption, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group, "Dark Storm Team" publicly claimed responsibility for targeting Zoom’s website. In their public claim, Dark Storm Team alleged they had infiltrated Zoom’s servers, though no technical evidence has surfaced to support this assertion. While Zoom’s official cause of the outage was tied to registrar error, the timing of Dark Storm Team’s claim has prompted some in the cybersecurity community to keep a close watch. Attribution to Dark Storm Team is currently assessed as Low to Moderate Confidence due to a lack of technical evidence tying them directly to the Zoom outage. The claim is likely opportunistic based on timing and the group's history of high-impact denial-of-service activity.

The Zoom incident is part of a broader pattern of escalating cyber threats targeting U.S.-based technology companies. Dark Storm has also claimed responsibility for disruptions against other high-profile platforms, including Spotify, further underscoring its interest in widely used digital services. Dark Storm Team, active since 2023, has been linked to a series of politically motivated cyberattacks, including denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns against major platforms Including X (formerly Twitter), where they exploited misconfigured servers to cause widespread outages. The group’s tactics often involve leveraging botnets composed of compromised IoT devices, such as IP cameras and DVRs, to overwhelm targeted systems. While no malware or direct exploit was confirmed in this incident, Dark Storm Team’s previous campaigns have leveraged HTTP flood attacks, UDP amplification, and botnet-based DDoS sourced from compromised IoT infrastructure. These methods not only disrupt services but could also be used as an initial access vector or a distraction technique to mask larger operations, including data exfiltration or infrastructure compromise.

Just days before the Zoom outage, Dark Storm Team also claimed responsibility for disrupting BreachForums, as well as launching DDoS attacks against the Hungarian Defense Ministry and the Finnish Central Bank. Their interference with BreachForums followed unconfirmed reports of a law enforcement seizure and the arrest of IntelBroker, a known figure in the cybercrime space. The group publicly stated that some of their operations were carried out simply for amusement, raising questions about their broader intent. Security analysts have noted similarities between Dark Storm Team's operations and those of other hacktivist groups like Killnet and Anonymous Sudan, suggesting potential collaborations or shared resources. These alliances enhance their capabilities, making their attacks more sophisticated and harder to mitigate. While direct links to groups like Lapsus$ remain speculative, the convergence of tactics and targets indicates a growing trend of ideologically driven cyber collectives focusing on U.S. tech infrastructure. No Zoom-specific indicators have been identified; however, prior campaigns attributed to Dark Storm Team have involved botnet command-and-control infrastructure, known IPs, and Telegram channels that should be monitored for activity spikes.

Threat Actor Breakdown

Recommendations

• Audit Registrar Dependencies: Conduct a registrar-level risk assessment across all business-critical domains, ensuring registrar redundancy and validating registrar-reseller communication protocols to prevent domain blocking incidents.
• Segment Collaboration Services in Network Architecture: Isolate collaboration tools like Zoom into their own network segment with enforced rate-limiting, DNS request filtering, and behavioral anomaly detection to reduce blast radius during targeted disruptions or outages.
• Deploy Active Threat Emulation for DDoS Resilience: Utilize advanced threat emulation tools to simulate DDoS attacks against critical SaaS platforms, testing your environment’s resilience and refining your upstream mitigation controls (e.g., cloud-based WAFs or DNS-layer defenses).

Hunter Insights

The April 16 Zoom outage, officially attributed to a domain registration error between GoDaddy Registry and Markmonitor but claimed by pro-Palestinian hacktivist group Dark Storm Team, signals an alarming trend in the evolving threat landscape targeting critical U.S. technology infrastructure. While attribution to Dark Storm Team remains speculative, their opportunistic claims against high-profile platforms, including Spotify, X, BreachForums, and government entities, suggest an escalating campaign against Western digital services.

Based on Dark Storm's established botnet infrastructure, known connections to hacktivist groups including Killnet and Anonymous Sudan, and their pattern of politically-driven target selection, U.S. technology firms should prepare for increasingly advanced and coordinated cyberattacks in the near future. These operations may transition from the current focus on service disruption toward more complex attack patterns where outages serve as distractions from the primary objectives: potential data theft and critical infrastructure sabotage. This incident underscores the urgent need for robust DNS redundancy, registrar dependency audits, and advanced DDoS resilience testing to mitigate the impact of similar future attacks.