Musk points finger at Ukraine as X faces major outages after cyber attack
Technology
"We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources"
(Web Desk) - Elon Musk has pointed the finger at Ukraine for a major cyber attack on X (formerly Twitter), that caused outages throughout Monday.
Tens of thousands of users reported at least three major outages of the website and app.
Pro-Palestinian hacker group Dark Storm Team claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on the platform, according to a public Telegram post. The group is known for primarily targeting countries and entities that support Israel's attack on Gaza.
However, Musk suggested that a "large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved" in the "massive" hack, in a series of posts on X. "We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources."
Musk later told Larry Kudlow, during an interview on Fox News, that the hackers had "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area."
A cyber operations expert has said that it ''doesn't make a lot of sense" that a state actor would be behind the attack on X today, after Elon Musk claimed that a country was to blame.
Musk posted on X that a "large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved" in the "massive" hack which took down the social media app.
He later appeared on Fox News where he claimed the IP addresses connected to the hack originated in the "Ukraine area."
Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University's School of Professional Studies, told the Star Tribune that a state actor ''doesn't make a lot of sense'' given the outages' short duration.
''There are kind of two types of cyber attacks — there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,'' he said.
''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. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low."
Reese acknowledged that a group may have been trying to make a statement with the attack, but said that such a short outage ''is not much of a statement to me.''
