Viasat <\/b>believes the cyberattack on its KA-SAT network last month that affected modems across Ukraine and Europe was \u201cdeliberate\u201d and intended to interrupt service, the company said in a report on the attack issued Wednesday. <\/p>\n
Viasat characterized the cyberattack on Feb. 24 as \u201cmultifaceted and deliberate.\u201d It caused a partial interruption of KA-SAT\u2019s consumer satellite broadband service. KA-SAT covers Europe and the Mediterranean region, and Viasat purchased the satellite, formerly owned by Eutelsat, last year when it purchased Eutelsat\u2019s share of Euro Broadband Infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Describing the attack, Viasat said malicious traffic was detected on modems in the Ukraine in a \u200b\u200btargeted denial of service attack. The attack impacted a majority of the previously active modems within Ukraine, affecting several thousand customers, and a substantial number of additional modems in other parts of Europe, affecting tens of thousands of fixed broadband customers. <\/p>\n
\u201cSubsequent investigation and forensic analysis identified a ground-based network intrusion by an attacker exploiting a misconfiguration in a VPN appliance to gain remote access to the trusted management segment of the KA-SAT network. The attacker moved laterally through this trusted management network to a specific network segment used to manage and operate the network, and then used this network access to execute legitimate, targeted management commands on a large number of residential modems simultaneously,\u201d the company said. <\/p>\n
This incident was localized to a single consumer-oriented partition of the KA-SAT network that is operated on Viasat\u2019s behalf by Eutelsat subsidiary Skylogic. The residential broadband modems affected use the \u201cTooway\u201d service brand. <\/p>\n
The company said there is no evidence that the KA-SAT satellite or its ground infrastructure were directly involved, impaired or compromised. Also, the cyberattack did not impact Viasat\u2019s directly managed mobility or government users on the KA-SAT satellite, or other Viasat users worldwide.<\/p>\n
The operator said the network was mostly stabilized within hours and fully stabilized within several days. To restore service to customers, Viasat said some modems received over-the-air updates, and Viasat has shipped nearly 30,000 modems to distributors in cases when the updates were not sufficient. The company is working with distributors to restore service to all end users. <\/p>\n
An investigation with third party firm Mandiant, Eutelsat\/Skylogic, and U.S. and international government agencies is ongoing, and Viasat did not speculate on the perpetrator. <\/p>\n
Executive Chairman Mark Dankberg addressed the cyberattack last week during SATELLITE 2022. \u201cWe\u2019re very sensitive to customers that have been disrupted, who we inherited, and we\u2019re working fast to bring them on,\u201d said Dankberg. \u201cIn the overall scheme of things, there will be worse cyberattacks if we\u2019re not vigilant. It\u2019s a constant battle. It\u2019s part of what we do and we think we do it extremely well.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Viasat believes the cyberattack on its KA-SAT network last month that affected modems across Ukraine and Europe was \u201cdeliberate\u201d and intended to interrupt service, the company said in a report on the attack issued Wednesday. Viasat characterized the cyberattack on Feb. 24 as \u201cmultifaceted and deliberate.\u201d It caused a partial interruption of KA-SAT\u2019s consumer satellite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}