An Example Of Satellite communication cyber attack
“The wars on land also reach space”
Russia - Ukraine War
Russia was behind a massive cyberattack against a satellite internet network that took thousands of modems offline at the onset of the war in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Canada and the European Union have said. The Viasat cyberattack is the biggest known hack of the war so far.
The digital assault against Viasat’s KA-SAT network began about an hour before Russia invaded Ukraine, on 24 February. The operation resulted in an immediate and significant loss of communication in the earliest days of the war for the Ukrainian military, which relied on Viasat’s services for command and control of the country’s armed forces.
As you already know, to black out the space-based satellites, the hackers never had to attack the satellites themselves. Instead, they focused on ground-based modems, the devices that communicated with the satellites. once you penetrate those sites’s network - “the sky is the limit” for the damage that can be done. The attack, launched destructive “wiper” malware called AcidRain (This wiper iterates over all possible device file identifiers, opens the device file, and either overwrites it or erase it) against Viasat modems and routers, quickly erasing all the data on the system. The machines then rebooted and were permanently disabled. Thousands of terminals were effectively destroyed in this way.
Moreover, during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a study published by Microsoft in April, there have been hundreds of cyber attacks by Russian groups since the outbreak of the war. The government worried that a cyber attack would shut down the internet which lead to miss-communication inside the county and outside –with the entire world.
Calling For Help
On February 26, Mikhail Fedorov, the Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, posted on Twitter to the founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk to help his country- to provide the internet with Starlink stations.
StarLink is a satellite Internet services provider, operated by the American company SpaceX. Elon Musk is SpaceX's CEO.
The project's vision is to provide satellite access to most of Earth's space by launching an array of about 42,000 satellites. So far, they launched 1,700 satellites to space. The project will allow everyone in the world to have cheap and free access to information and communication regardless of economic or political belonging. Within two days, along with the US and European countries, Musk sent thousands of terminals to Ukraine. The terminals are similar to satellite dishes that receive satellite TV broadcasts, and today there are about 10,000 such terminals in Ukraine to replace internet services destroyed.
Russia has again tried to attack the Starlink system for two weeks in a row but failed to do so. Starlink infrastructure can be updated several times a day, much like Tesla vehicles, minimizing the threat of unpatched vulnerabilities. The ability of Starlink to update its software multiple times a day is what's been preventing Starlink from going down and still being there.