Elon Musk‘s suggestion that Ukraine was behind a cyber attack on his social media site X has been dismissed as ‘garbage’ by one of Britain’s top experts.
Ciaran Martin, who was previously in charge of the UK’s national cyber security, said there was ‘absolutely no evidence’ the attack originated from the war-torn country.
X, which is still commonly known as Twitter despite Mr Musk’s rebranding efforts, suffered severe disruption on Monday with a series of outages.
In a post on the site, Mr Musk said a ‘massive cyber attack’ had been conducted ‘with a lot of resources’ and he was ‘tracing’ its origins.
The billionaire tech mogul – an ally of US President Donald Trump – added a ‘large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved’.
He later pointed the finger at Ukraine, telling Fox News he was ‘not sure exactly what happened’ but the attack came from IP addresses ‘originating in the Ukraine area’.
Yet Professor Martin, who helped to found and then led the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) between 2016 to 2020, rubbished Mr Musk’s claims.
He pointed to how a pro-Palestinian ‘hacktivist’ group known as Dark Storm Team had already claimed responsibility for the attack.
Elon Musk ‘s suggestion that Ukraine was behind a cyber attack on his social media site X has been dismissed as ‘garbage’ by one of Britain’s top experts
Ciaran Martin, who was previously in charge of the UK’s national cyber security, said there was ‘absolutely no evidence’ the attack originated from the war-torn country
X, which is still commonly known as Twitter despite Mr Musk’s rebranding efforts, suffered severe disruption on Monday with a series of outages
Professor Martin told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We’ll wait and see whether they are responsible.
‘But there’s absolutely no evidence that this has come out of Ukraine.’
The cyber security expert, who is now based at the University of Oxford, explained how X appeared to have been subject to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
‘Facts are always murky and clearly Twitter went down three times and struggled for much of the day,’ he said.
‘It does look like what we call a DDoS attack… where attackers point loads of traffic at a website and it falls over. It looks like that’s what happened.’
Professor Martin questioned X’s cyber security capabilities over the ‘remarkable incident’, adding: ‘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.
‘I can’t think of a company of the size and standing, internationally, of X that’s fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time.
‘It doesn’t reflect well on their cyber security.’
In a post on the site, Mr Musk said a ‘massive cyber attack’ had been conducted ‘with a lot of resources’ and he was ‘tracing’ its origins
The businessman later pointed the finger at Ukraine, telling Fox News he was ‘not sure exactly what happened’ but the attack came from IP addresses ‘originating in the Ukraine area’.
Professor Martin also queried the ‘remarkable’ suggestion by Mr Musk – who has previously been ridiculed for pushing false claims online – that Ukraine was to blame.
‘What Mr Musk has said is wholly unconvincing based on the evidence so far. It’s pretty much garbage,’ he added.
‘He mentioned in a post on X, when it came back online, that he was ‘tracing’.
‘In a DDoS attack, you can trace where some of the traffic has come from to IP addresses and Musk has said some of the IP addresses have come from Ukraine.
‘That tells you absolutely nothing because what hackers do in these types of attacks is they hijack infrastructure – CCTV cameras, IT devices from all over the world.
‘So some of them will be from Ukraine, some of them will be from Russia, some of them will be from Britain, the US, South America, everywhere.
‘It tells you absolutely nothing.’
Mr Musk has been one of Kyiv’s fiercest critics amid Mr Trump’s dramatic spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The world’s richest man last month brushed off claims he is a ‘bought asset’ of Russia by joking that the country’s autocratic leader Vladimir Putin ‘can’t afford me’.
