Musk links cyberattack on X to Ukraine without evidence – Source: www.csoonline.com

Elon Musk owned X experienced a flurry of outages on Monday, even as the Dark Storm hacking group claimed DDoS attacks on the text-heavy social media giant.

The pro-palestinian hacktivist group reportedly claimed the attacks on a Telegram channel, posting “Twitter has been taken offline by Dark Storm Team.”

Also added in the post were links to CheckHost.net reports from Monday that showed X website and application being down for several IPs across the globe.

Political activist and social media influencer Ed Krassenstein claimed on X that he has been in contact with the leader of DarkStorm who said the attack was “just a demonstration of our strength” and they next plan to attack a large bank in Africa.

Elon links attack to Ukraine

On Monday, Musk confirmed the cyberattack on X. “There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X.” he said in an X post. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

A few hours later, Musk claimed on national television that a preliminary investigation revealed a connection to Ukraine.

“There was a massive cyberattack, trying to bring down the X systems, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” he said.

Krassenstein, however, debunked Musk’s claims as propaganda as he said he’s in touch with Dark Storm and they aren’t in Ukraine.

In one of the followup comments on his X post, Krassenstein claimed he spoke to Musk and told him about his conversation with Dark Storm’s leader. “This seems like an attempt to attack Ukraine to me,” he added as Musk made allegations about Ukraine anyway.

Nation-state involvement is possible

While very less is known about the attack, despite a bunch of revelations, experts think a nation-state involvement is indeed possible.

“X is under relentless cyberattacks: 24/7/365 and this is far beyond simple DoS attempts,” said Chad Cragle, CISO at DeepWatch. “While technical issues can occur, X’s engineers understand scalability and redundancy. This isn’t incompetence; it’s cyberwar hitting at full force. With Musk in the spotlight and political tensions at a peak, these attacks bear all the indicators of nation-state aggression.”

Krassenstein, however, shared further alleged evidence to show Musk’s Ukrainian IP claims to be false. In a few chat screenshots shared, he could be seen asking Dark Storm about the Ukraine claim to which they said, “Elon Musk must provide evidence for his claim, and we will provide evidence for ours.”

“We can attack again. A stronger attack this time, not only on X but Tesla and others.” Dark Storm could be seen adding in the chat. Dark Storm Team is a hacktivist group reportedly founded in 2023, and is known for launching cyberattacks against entities they perceive as supporting Israel.