The social network X suffered intermittent outages on Monday, a situation owner Elon Musk attributed to a “massive cyberattack.” Musk said in an initial X post that the attack was perpetrated by “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country.” In a post on Telegram, a pro-Palestinian group known as Dark Storm Team took credit for the attacks within a few hours. Later on Monday, though, Musk claimed in an interview on Fox Business Network that the attacks had come from Ukrainian IP addresses.
Web traffic analysis experts who tracked the incident on Monday were quick to emphasize that the type of attacks X seemed to face—distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks—are launched by a coordinated army of computers, or a “botnet,” pummeling a target with junk traffic in an attempt to overwhelm and take down its systems. Botnets are typically dispersed around the world, generating traffic with geographically diverse IP addresses, and they can include mechanisms that make it harder to determine where they are controlled from.
“It’s important to recognize that IP attribution alone is not conclusive. Attackers frequently use compromised devices, VPNs, or proxy networks to obfuscate their true origin,” says Shawn Edwards, chief security officer of the network connectivity firm Zayo.
X did not return WIRED’s requests for comment about the attacks.
Multiple researchers tell WIRED that they observed five distinct attacks of varying length against X’s infrastructure, the first beginning early Monday morning with the final burst on Monday afternoon.
The internet intelligence team at Cisco’s ThousandEyes tells WIRED in a statement, “During the disruptions, ThousandEyes observed network conditions that are characteristic of a DDoS attack, including significant traffic loss conditions which would have hindered users from reaching the application.”
DDoS attacks are common, and virtually all modern internet services experience them regularly and must proactively defend themselves. As Musk himself put it on Monday, “We get attacked every day.” Why, then, did these DDoS attacks cause outages for X? Musk said it was because “this was done with a lot of resources,” but independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont and other analysts see evidence that some X origin servers, which respond to web requests, weren’t properly secured behind the company’s Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible. As a result, attackers could target them directly. X has since secured the servers.
“The botnet was directly attacking the IP and a bunch more on that X subnet yesterday. It’s a botnet of cameras and DVRs,” Beaumont says.
A few hours after the final attack concluded, Musk told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in an interview, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Musk has mocked Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, repeatedly since Russia invaded its neighbor in February 2022. A major campaign donor to President Donald Trump, Musk now heads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has razed the US federal government and its workforce in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has recently warmed relations with Russia and moved the US away from its longtime support of Ukraine. Musk has already been involved in these geopolitics in the context of a different company he owns, SpaceX, which operates the satellite internet service Starlink that many Ukrainians rely on.
DDoS traffic analysis can break down the firehose of junk traffic in different ways, including by listing the countries that had the most IP addresses involved in an attack. But one researcher from a prominent firm, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about X, noted that they did not even see Ukraine in the breakdown of the top 20 IP address origins involved in the X attacks.
If Ukrainian IP addresses did contribute to the attacks, though, numerous researchers say that the fact alone is not noteworthy.
“What we can conclude from the IP data is the geographic distribution of traffic sources, which may provide insights into botnet composition or infrastructure used,” Zayo’s Edwards says. “What we can’t conclude with certainty is the actual perpetrator’s identity or intent.”
Additional reporting by Zoë Schiffer.
