STF, PF and Anatel suffer cyber attack

National Telecommunications Agency says action was expected after X was blocked. Systems operation has returned to normal. The Federal Police (PF), the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) were the target of cyber attacks that generated instability in their systems in recent days.

The hackers’ actions took place after the publication of decisions by Supreme Court Justice 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 it is a frequent target of such actions, especially in circumstances that “involve sensitive issues.” Anatel detected attempts to take down its operating system on Friday (September 30), when the old Twitter began to be suspended in the country following an order from Moraes.

“Following the STF’s decision to block X, the Agency observed an expected increase in these attacks, which caused momentary instability 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 systems were targeted last Thursday (29/08) by an attack called DDoS, when a website is overloaded with thousands of simultaneous accesses and cannot operate. A day earlier, Moraes had given X 24 hours to appoint a representative in Brazil, under penalty of suspension of the platform.

The Court said its systems were down for 10 minutes, but that there was no operational damage. “The court’s technical team acted quickly, taking the services offline and implementing new layers of security, 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 reestablished and no compromise to the institution’s systems or access to data has been detected,” it said.

As DW has shown, the dispute between X’s owner, Elon Musk, and Minister Alexandre de Moraes is gaining momentum. On Tuesday, Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink, backed down and decided to comply with the judge’s order to block access to the X platform in the country.

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