Network X "crashes", billionaire Elon Musk explains unconvincing reasons

Billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform X was disrupted yesterday, leaving tens of thousands of people unable to access it. The Tesla boss said the platform was attacked by some organization, but cybersecurity experts pointed out otherwise.

"We get attacked every day, but this time it was done with a lot of resources. It could be a large, organized group or a nation state," Musk wrote in a post on X yesterday.

Cybersecurity experts point out that these types of attacks - known as denial of service - can be carried out by small groups or just one individual.

The world's richest man did not elaborate on what he meant by "a lot of resources," and his comments drew skepticism from cybersecurity experts, who pointed out that these types of attacks — known as denial of service — have been repeatedly carried out by small groups or even by individuals.

According to Downdetector, X faced intermittent outages, leaving 39,021 users in the US unable to access the platform at its peak at 10 a.m. ET. By 5 p.m., service was still reportedly down for about 1,500 users.

X was hit by multiple denial-of-service attacks starting at around 9:45 UTC, a source in the internet infrastructure industry said. The source requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Denial of service attacks work by overloading targeted websites with fake traffic. Such attacks are not necessarily sophisticated, but they can cause significant disruption.

In a later interview with Fox Business Network's Larry Kudlow, billionaire Musk said the cyberattack came from IP addresses originating in the Ukraine region.

However, industry sources have dismissed Mr Musk's claims, saying that the majority of the fake X attack traffic can be traced back to IP addresses in the US, Vietnam, Brazil and other countries. The fake traffic coming directly from Ukraine is "insignificant".

Denial-of-service attacks are notoriously difficult to trace back to the perpetrator, after all, and the IP addresses involved rarely provide any useful information about who's behind them.

Source: https://www.baogiaothong.vn/mang-x-sap-nguon-ty-phu-elon-musk-giai-thiich-ly-do-thieu-thuet-phuc-192250311114715502.htm