Communications Giant ‘Viasat’ Suffers an Attack.
The satellite communications company says cyber event is causing outages across Europe.
In a communication to the media channels and reporters, Viasat admitted to suffering a cyber attack which has caused outages in Ukraine and other neighboring countries in some parts of Europe on its KA-SAT network.
The staff at the company, responsible for addressing IT issues, is analyzing the network and systems to revive the services. This is being done to find out the root cause and prevent more such incidents from happening. Ongoing investigations being conducted by cybersecurity experts is assisted by government and its agencies.
Christina Phillips, vice president of public relations at Viasat, has released a statement which can be seen as a confidence building measure: “Our investigation into the outage continues, but so far we believe it was caused by a cyber event. We are investigating and analyzing our European network and systems to identify the root cause and are taking additional network precautions to prevent further impacts while we attempt to recover service to affected customers.”
The time of the attack was the same as the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was reported that there was an attack on KASAT infrastructure in Ukraine which continued to spread. SkyNet, a British news channel has reported that the impact was caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. As a result, several ISPs in European countries including Germany-based EUSANET experienced outages and disruptions in their broadband connectivity.
The KA-SAT network is not directly operated by Viasat. Instead, a third party oversees the operations on the network and extends the service through various distributors. Ukraine’s military and security services have acquired different communication systems during the years before the conflict. These systems were run on Viasat’s network.
The company has stated that clients who directly subscribed to Viasat’s services remained safe from the disruptions. There is a possibility, therefore, that intrusion was made through third party systems which used the KA-SAT network.
To ascertain the real reason behind the broadband disruptions in various regions of Europe, Viasat has hired the services of Mandiant, a company well-known for investigating breaches instigated by state-sponsored hackers. No official from NSA, ANSSI or Mandiant was immediately available to confirm the news.
A Czech telecom executive, Stritecky, has absolved Viasat of the blame whereas some other point the finger straight at the satellite communication company. Amid these conflicting statements and confusing situation, the truth lies somewhere. We may have to wait until the investigations present a conclusive result and the real attackers are identified.
