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Honestly, I do resent Elon Musk’s increasing political ties, not because of who or what he may believe in, but because it inevitably makes everybody who writes about electric cars, space discovery, or indeed social media, a quasi-political commentator by default, just for sharing observations about the latest news relating to his businesses.
And today’s latest round of conspiracy bait is another example that’s bound to see a few more Elon fans angrily typing into my mentions.
As you may have noted, X was intermittently down today, in many regions, due to what X owner Elon Musk has claimed was a cyber attack on a large scale.
In response to reports of the outages, Musk explained that:
“There was a massive cyberattack against X. 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.”
Hours later, in a televised interview on Fox Business, Elon blamed a Ukraine-based group for the alleged DDos attack.
“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Okay, that seems a little unlikely, that a Ukraine-based group, a region not known for cyber attacks on foreign entities, which is in the midst of a massive territorial conflict, has decided to go after Elon’s businesses, in order to seemingly get him back for his recent comments on the conflict.
I mean, unlikely, not impossible. But then again, all other intelligence suggests that it was actually a known hacker group, originating from Russia, that took aim at X this morning.
Over on Telegram, a group called “Dark Storm” took responsibility for the DDoS attack. Mentions of Dark Storm, which has been identified by cybersecurity experts as a pro-Palestinian group with links to Russia, which seemingly offers DDoS attacks as a service, have also reportedly been found in code mentions relating to the X attack.
And because X has reduced its security measures as a result of cost-cutting, it’s more susceptible to such, so the more likely scenario is that Dark Storm conducted a large scale DDoS attack on X. At the behest of whom, it may be impossible to say, but it seems slightly questionable that Musk would both look to pin it on Ukraine, and make such claims in public, without first conducting a thorough investigation.
But Musk is also currently pushing to force Ukraine to hold elections (which it can’t do) with a view to ousting its current leadership, in order to facilitate an end to the current war with Russia. Which, from one perspective, makes sense, in that peace is the ultimate goal, but this version of peace would also allow Russia to take over a section of Ukraine, with tacit approval from the U.S.
Which seems like a very dangerous precedent to set.
Again, that’s too political for me to comment on, and I’m far from being across all of the complexities of that conflict. But it does seem like Elon Musk is once again letting his political ambitions bleed into his day-to-day business efforts, which could have significant impacts on all of his companies.
Already, Tesla sales are tanking, while various protests against Tesla (or more operatively, against Musk) are being reported around the world. SpaceX is still working to create a viable rocket to fly to Mars, after its latest explosion, and X is now being subjected to large-scale DDoS attacks.
Again, these are seemingly protests against Musk’s political stances, not against the companies themselves. But with Tesla’s share price dropping, and Elon’s other businesses seemingly not faring any better, it’ll be interesting to see how long Musk can continue to hole up in the White House, and inject his opinions into every issue, while simultaneously fronting all of these projects.
Because it seems inevitable that his businesses are going to feel the pain. Starlink, for example, has become a key resource in many regions, but with Musk suggesting over the weekend that he could personally switch off Starlink access if he feels like it, you can bet that many governments are now considering other options.
And this could be just the beginning for attacks against X as well.
The platform has struggled to grow its userbase since Musk took over, and outages like this, if they were to be sustained, could eventually hurt its viability as a real-time news source.
The again, it could be a one off attack, and maybe it did actually originate from Ukrainian-based hackers, as Musk suggests. But I would hazard a guess that this is another escalation in the broader pushback against Musk, that’s not going to improve for some time yet.
And while he has every right to stand up to such, and fight back against attacks on his businesses, it will be his businesses, and their performance, that suffer as a result.
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