WALES: Russia was behind a massive cyberattack against a satellite internet network which took tens of thousands of modems offline at the onset of Russia-Ukraine war, the United States, Britain, Canada, Estonia and the European Union said on Tuesday.
The digital assault against Viasat’s KA-SAT network in late February took place just as Russian armour pushed intoUkraine.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the cyberattack was intended “to disrupt Ukrainian command and control during the invasion, and those actions had spilloverimpacts into other European countries.”
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called the satelliteinternet hack “deliberate and malicious” and the Council of the EU said it caused “indiscriminate communication outages” in Ukraine and several EU member states.
The Viasat outage remains the most publicly visiblecyberattack carried out since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inpart because the hack had immediate knock-on consequences for satellite internet users across Europe and because the crippled modems often had to be replaced manually.
“After those modems were knocked offline it wasn’t like youunplug them and plug them back in and reboot and they come back,” the U.S. National Security Agency’s Director ofCybersecurity Rob Joyce told Reuters on the sidelines of acybersecurity conference on Tuesday.
Internet in Ukraine disrupted as Russian troops advance
“They were down and down hard; they had to go back to thefactory to be swapped out.”
The precise consequences of the hack on the Ukrainianbattlefield have not been made public, but government contracts reviewed by Reuters show that KA-SAT has provided internet connectivity to Ukrainian military and police units.
The satellite modem sabotage caused a “huge loss incommunications in the very beginning of war,” Ukrainiancybersecurity official Victor Zhora said in March.
In a statement, Ukraine’s State Service of SpecialCommunications and Information Protection said that Russia “is an aggressor country attacking Ukraine not only on our land, but in cyberspace too.”
The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Moscow routinely denies it carries out offensive cyber operations.
Viasat said in a statement that it “recognized” the announcement and would continue to work with governmentofficials to investigate the hack.
The company did not provide an update on a Viasat official’s comments to Reuters in late March that the hackers were still trying to interfere with the company’s operations, albeit to limited effect.
The satellite modem-wrecking cyberattack remains the mostvisible hack of the war, but many others have taken place since and not all of them have been made public.
“That was the biggest single event,” said Joyce. “It certainly had new and novel tradecraft, but there have been multiple attacks.”