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Elon Musk claims cyberattack targeting X originated from Ukraine but experts don’t think state was involved
Hours after microblogging platform X faced a global outage, entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed on Monday that the social media site was disrupted by a “massive cyberattack.” The billionaire said the attack originated in the “Ukraine area”.
After thousands of X users reported outages throughout Monday, Musk took to X to post that the attack was done with a lot of resources. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote on X. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
A source in the internet infrastructure industry told Reuters that X had been hit by several waves of denial of service (DoS) attacks at around 9.45 am US time on Monday.
However, during an interview with Fox, Musk revealed that the attack originated from IP addresses “in the Ukraine area” and that the attackers were trying to “bring down the X system.” However, the 53-year-old entrepreneur did not provide additional evidence to support his accusations.
The attack comes a day before US and Ukrainian delegates were set to meet in Saudi Arabia for peace talks. For the same reason, many believe it was improbable that Ukraine could be behind the act which could have a far-reaching consequence. “It makes absolutely no sense for Ukrainian hackers to attack Elon Musk the day before a meeting between the United States and Ukraine in which they are attempting to get the United States to start sharing intelligence again, and provide aid and assistance, working towards a peace agreement that has been in question since the Oval Office visit,” the Atlantic Council’s Alex Plitsas told The New York Post on Monday.
Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies, too believes it doesn’t make sense that a state actor was involved in the hacking, considering the short duration of the outage. He mentions two types of cyber attacks, loud and quiet.
“And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors,” Reese told the Star Tribune.
Though Reese agrees that a group may have been trying to make a statement with the attack, he said such a short outage ‘was “not much of a statement to me.”
THE WEEK