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Cybersecurity experts deny Elon Musk and blame him directly for the Twitter cyberattack
Experts doubt it was a country-organized attack, blaming it more on security issues at X.
The X social network, formerly known as Twitter, suffered intermittent outages last Monday due to a massive cyberattack. While Elon Musk, owner of the platform, attributed the incident to an offensive perpetrated by “a large coordinated group and/or country,” cybersecurity experts have pointed out that the real problem lies in internal flaws in the company’s infrastructure.
Musk initially suggested on X that the attack came from an unknown organization with vast resources. Later, in an interview with Fox Business Network, he claimed that the IP addresses linked to the offensive originated in Ukraine. However, independent researchers have debunked this claim, noting that analysis of network traffic shows no evidence of prominent Ukrainian involvement in the attack.
Cybersecurity specialists have confirmed to Wired that the attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) offensive, a technique in which an army of infected computers, known as a botnet, bombards a system with massive traffic to crash it. According to Shawn Edwards, chief security officer at the firm Zayo, “It is important to recognize that attribution based on IP addresses is not conclusive. Attackers often use compromised devices, virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxies to hide their true location.”
Cisco’s internet intelligence team, ThousandEyes, backed up this version in a statement, “During the outages, we observed network conditions characteristic of a DDoS attack, including significant traffic loss that made it difficult for users to access the application.” Such attacks are common and technology platforms usually have defense mechanisms in place to mitigate them. However, independent analysts, such as security expert Kevin Beaumont, claim that X did not have some of its origin servers properly protected, which allowed attackers to attack them directly. “The botnet directly attacked X’s IP address and others within the same subnet,” Beaumont explained.
Despite the seriousness of the incident, Musk insisted on his version during an interview with journalist Larry Kudlow on Fox Business: “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to take down X’s system with IP addresses coming from Ukraine.”
This statement has been met with skepticism in the cybersecurity community. One researcher, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity, claimed that his analysis of the traffic did not show Ukraine among the top 20 origins of the IPs involved. “What we can conclude from the IP data is the geographic distribution of traffic sources, which may give clues about the composition of the botnet or the infrastructure used. What we cannot conclude with certainty is the identity or actual intent of the perpetrator.”
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