ELON Musk's claim that Monday’s Twitter/X outage had Ukrainian links has been slammed as "garbage" by a cyber security expert.
Musk said the social media platform was targeted in a “massive cyberattack” on Monday.
He said in a post on the site: “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he said in a post. “Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”
Later on, he told Fox Business Network that the attackers had “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area” without providing further details.
Cybersecurity experts quickly pointed out that this does not necessarily mean that an attack originated in Ukraine.
Allan Liska of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future pointed out that even if “every IP address that hit Twitter [on Monday] originated from Ukraine (doubtful), they were most likely compromised machines controlled by a botnet run by a third party that could be located anywhere in the world.”
Complaints about outages spiked around 11am UK time and again at 3pm with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.
One cybersecurity expert branded the accusations by Musk as “garbage”.
The former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Ciaran Martin, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it was a “remarkable incident”.
Martin said: “I am very surprised that X fell over as a result of a DDoS attack, it’s a very large-scale DDoS attack but it’s not that sophisticated, it’s a very old technique.”
He said that he could not think of an example of a company the size of X “falling over” due to a DDoS attack “for a very long time”, adding that it “doesn’t reflect well on their cybersecurity”.
Martin said that Musk’s claim that the attack had links to Ukraine was “wholly unconvincing based on the evidence so far” and “pretty much garbage”.
One other cybersecurity expert said that the likelihood of a state actor being behind the possible attack “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration.
