Russia downed satellite internet — West
NEWPORT: Russia was behind a massive cyberattack against a satellite internet network that took tens of thousands of modems offline at the onset of RussiaUkraine war, the United States, Britain, Canada, Estonia and the European Union said yesterday.
The digital assault against Viasat’s KASAT network in late February took place just as Russian armour pushed into Ukraine.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the cyberattack was intended ‘‘to disrupt Ukrainian command and control during the invasion, and those actions had spillover impacts into other European countries’’.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss called the satellite internet 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 visible cyberattack carried out since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in part because the hack had immediate knockon 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 you unplug them and plug them back in and reboot and they come back,’’ US National Security Agency director of cybersecurity Rob Joyce said.
‘‘They were down and down hard; they had to go back to the factory to be swapped out.’’
Consequences of the hack on the Ukrainian battlefield have not been made public, but government contracts show KASAT has provided internet connectivity to Ukrainian military and police units.
The sabotage caused a ‘‘huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war’’, Ukrainian cybersecurity official Victor Zhora said in March.— Reuters