Fox’s Steve Doocy Plows Right Through Musk’s Ukrainian Hack Reference

As nearly all know, amidst what was already a fairly bad day going into another week of trading Tesla stock, Elon Musk’s most visible – and perhaps symbolic – company experienced some technical difficulties yesterday. As a testament to where this country stands circa 2025, X went down for a few hours and people promptly lost their sh*t – as if their bank returned NSF at the ATM with six figures sitting in the account. Withdrawal can be tough, money or drug. No one knows this better than Musk who – upon investigation, told the world that the X-attack was tied to IP addresses in the Ukraine, strongly implying that Ukrainians were responsible. It is a big enough deal that others looked into the matter and, well – it appears as though there is another level of analysis. An important one.

Steve Doocy sat in his familiar place on the couch this morning and promptly dropped a wet noodle on the hot accusation that Ukrainians have brought their war to your phone. If that sounds like “good news” it’s not. Musk may be able to throw people off the scent but this appears to be the work of a group that won’t stop at an attack on X and may do things that bring about more than social media withdrawal. Per a report in Mediaite, the next level is problematic:

STEVE DOOCY: Meanwhile, I’m sure you saw Elon Musk on with Larry Kudlow last night. He said this and we want your reaction. Watch this.

ELON MUSK: 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.

STEVE DOOCY: Okay. So X had a gigantic denial of services attack and it looks like it’s Ukraine.

But you and I were talking. It probably looks like it’s coming from Ukraine. But these guys, they have ways of making it look like it’s coming from Ukraine, even though they’re not in Ukraine.

And I suggested it might be Russia. We don’t know exactly who it is.

Everyone is being really careful with the specific language used – the implications of which, less so. But notice that Musk said that the IP addresses only originated in Ukraine. He did not expressly say that Ukrainians were behind the attack. He left any association to the viewers. Crediting Doocy and Knutsson, neither of them said that Musk called out the Ukrainian people. They had a more important accusation.

KURT KNUTSSON: Yeah, we don’t know yet, but we will find out at some point. Now originating– it’s– what Elon Musk is saying is that they were able to identify the fact that the IP address of this attack, which, by the way, sent Brian to the moon, was bananas yesterday. “I can’t get on Twitter!”.

It’s X, Brian.

Well, we originate– what Elon Musk was saying is that the IP address was coming from the Ukraine.

But what we also know is that it’s very easy for hackers and cyber criminals to make it appear as though their IP address or an attack is coming from one particular region or another.

So we’ll get to the bottom of that at some point. So I don’t know.

But what we also know, though, is shortly after Elon Musk said that a group called the Dark Storm Team, it’s a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group, claimed that they were behind the attack.

We know that 40,000 people, in addition to Brian, were reporting the outage on X yesterday, according to the down detector website. And last major outage that they had on X was back in February, almost a year ago. That lasted for hours.

And what we also know about that hacking group is we best know them more recently, where we reported that they attacked two U.S. airports in their systems, LAX and JFK.

So it’s a serious group. They’re a menace. They go after Israel, they go after NATO countries, and chances are they were behind this attack. But we don’t know yet.

STEVE DOOCY: Okay. And not actually in Ukraine, we don’t think.

That is probably as close to definitive as it’s going to get until there is ironclad proof. If the attack was a political statement (Which no one should support), and Musk got lumped in with the administration as the recipient, we’re all left to wonder why Musk would choose to associate it with the Ukrainian people in the war with Russia but not with Palestinians and their conflict with Israel. Perhaps it is because there is more anti-Ukrainian solidarity among Trump supporters, whereas the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is more nebulous. We don’t know. We only know the tack Musk took.

None of this is good news in any way. Someone will have to explain to me how an attack on LAX and JFK – more so than even an attack on X, which is nowhere near irrelevant – is somehow less harmful or provocative than phoning in a bomb threat. One can envision scenarios where such an attack is equivalent to unleashing a bomb. It puts people at risk and costs a fortune which is why cyberspace is likely where one will see the first shots fired if and when there is ever another multi-national war. There will be a premium on making the opponent go blind. So it appears that the U.S. should be attacking this Dark Storm Team itself. To that end, Musk will need to point directly at them if it’s established that they are responsible for the attack. It is critical that the American people know of the threat and support its elimination.

Given the amount of trash thrown at Fox News, it’s probably best to highlight when they’re doing a good job. Remember the name, “Dark Storm Team,” and then hope that Musk helps. None of this is a joke.

God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected] and on twitter-X at @JasonMiciak, and follow now on Bluesky. 

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