Message linking Amber Heard to Gold Coast sportsman came from inside Elon Musk’s SpaceX

FORMER lovebirds Elon Musk and Amber Heard have reunited on the Gold Coast but it seems someone at the billionaire’s rocket company SpaceX is unhappy at the prospect of any reconciliation.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Washington DC on July 19. Picture: AFP/Brendan Smialowski

FORMER lovebirds Elon Musk and Amber Heard have reunited on the Gold Coast but it seems someone at the billionaire’s rocket company SpaceX is unhappy at the prospect of any reconciliation.

The Bulletin received a message on August 4 — the day before news of the couple’s split broke — claiming Aquaman star Heard, 31, had been seeing a local sportsman.

The message included the Gold Coast address where Heard is staying — previously a closely guarded secret.

The Bulletin has withheld the sportsman’s name and Heard’s address.

“(Redacted) is spending many nights week at Amber Heard’s house on (redacted) on the (redacted) and leaving early in the morning looking like the cat that swallowed the canary,” the message said.

The sportsman denied the allegation, saying: “Who told you this?”

According to the message’s metadata, the information was sent from California on August 4 from an iPhone using the IP address belonging to Space Exploration Technologies Corp — better known as SpaceX.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveils the company's new manned spacecraft, The Dragon V2, designed to carry astronauts into space, in Hawthorne, California, in 2014. Picture: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.

The privately held US aerospace company was founded by billionaire businessman Musk.

Numerous information technology experts have told The Bulletin it was highly unlikely — but not impossible — the Space X IPv4 address, owned by US internet service provider Cogent Communications, had been hijacked, meaning it likely came from within the organisation.

They said alarm bells would sound at SpaceX if its IP address had been compromised and someone outside the company had sent the message.

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Security operations team leader Phil Cole from AusCERT, a leading Cyber Emergency Response Team that protects organisations in Australia and the Asia/Pacific including The University of Queensland, said it was possible but unlikely the Space X IP address had been ‘spoofed”.

‘Spoofing’ occurs when an email message is created with a misleading sender address.

“The originating IP for the tip does appear to be associated with SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp) based on ‘whois’ records for this IP, however this does not guarantee that it is definitely a SpaceX employee,” he said.

“It isn’t really possible to spoof the network traffic to make it appear to have come from this address.

“While it could be possible that there is a compromised host within SpaceX that was used to proxy traffic through, it is highly unlikely that someone would go to the effort to do this.

“I don’t see anything that would indicate that a host inside SpaceX has been compromised.”

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft on-board, launching from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 3, 2017. Picture: AFP/NASA/Bill Ingalls.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Head of Software Engineering & Data Communications, Emeritus Professor Bill Caelli, said a person would require a very sophisticated level of knowledge and expertise “well beyond the average home user” to fake the IP address.

An expert in public policy and security/cryptography, information technology development and computer security, information technology and network security, Professor Caelli received The Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education Founders Medal in June for exceptional service to cybersecurity education.

He said two things would have to happen for the SpaceX address to be compromised to message The Bulletin.

“The ‘baddie’ (the person hijacking the IP address) has to have the technical ability and the ‘goodie’ (the user being hijacked) has to have holes and gaps in their addresses,” he said.

The Bulletin contacted SpaceX for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.