Tag Archive for: satellite

Russia’s Viasat Hack Exposed Satellite Industry’s Security Flaws

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As Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, a network used throughout Europe—and by the Ukrainian military—faced an unprecedented cyberattack that doubled as an industrywide wake-up call.

By Katrina Manson
Illustrations by Jordan Speer

Andreas Wickberg loves snowmobiling to the house he built in the icy reaches of Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle. Each month come spring, he and his wife relocate for a week or so to a “very, very isolated” spot about 335 miles northwest of their usual home near Umea, a Swedish university town. Up in Lapland, it’s just them and three other houses. Wickberg develops payment-processing software for a Swedish e-commerce company. What makes this possible is satellite internet: For 500 krona ($45) a month, he and his wife can make work calls by day and stream movies by night.

Just over a year ago, though, they and their neighbors found themselves cut off from the outside world. At 7 a.m. on Feb. 24, 2022, Wickberg turned on his computer and took in the news that Russian President Vladimir Putin had begun an invasion of Ukraine with airstrikes on Kyiv and many other cities. Wickberg read everything he could, aghast. Not long after, a neighbor came around asking to borrow the family’s Wi-Fi password because their internet was on the fritz. Wickberg obliged, but 10 minutes later, his connection dropped, too. When he checked his modem, all four lights were off, meaning the device was no longer communicating with KA-SAT, Viasat Inc.’s 13,560-pound satellite floating 22,236 miles above.

<span style="color:#818181; font-size:110%; font-weight:bold">● The KA-SAT satellite covers Europe with 82 spot beams.</span>

● The KA-SAT satellite covers Europe with 82 spot beams.
Courtesy Airbus

The way each of the connections in his community switched off one by one left him convinced that this wasn’t just a glitch. He concluded Russia had hacked his modem. “It’s a scary feeling,” Wickberg says. “I actually thought that these systems were much more secure, that it was sort of far-fetched that this could even happen.”

Viasat staffers in the US, where the company is based, were caught by surprise, too. Across Europe and North Africa, tens of thousands of internet connections in at least 13 countries were going dead. Some of the biggest service…

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STARCOM’s ‘Black Skies’ exercise includes satellite jamming

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SpaceFlag 22-3

SPACE FLAG 22-3 participants pose for a group photo at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado, Aug. 8, 2022. (U.S. Space Force photo by Judi Tomich)

AFA 2022 — The first of a new series of Space Force exercises aimed at training Guardians in specific skill sets is underway this week, called Black Skies and focused on electronic warfare — including “live fire” in the form of real-world satellite jamming, according to the head of the service’s training command.

“It’s an electronic warfare exercise that Guardians are participating in, particularly the Space Operations Command units,” Maj. Gen. Shawn Bratton, commander of Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM) told reporters here today.

The chromatic “Skies series” of exercises are modeled on the Air Force “Flag” exercises, and are more focused than the annual SPACE FLAG exercises that have been ongoing for many years. This year’s SPACE FLAG 22-3 was held Aug. 8-19 at Shriever SFB in Colorado, and was the first following the exercise’s accreditation as a joint training activity. It involved some 120 participants, including from the Air Force and the Army. The next iteration of Space Flag will be a coalition exercise involving allies among the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing group (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.”

“There was a big Army presence there,” Bratton said.

The ongoing Black Skies exercise includes Guardians and Air National Guard units specializing in space, since the Defense Department has yet to come to a conclusion about the fate of those Guard personnel. Bratton explained that the exercises mixes both “live fire” and “constructive” training, including the use of a satellite “leased” from commercial companies to play the target.

He explained that the key area of EW training for Space Force personnel that is different from that required by Air Force trainees revolves around satellite jamming — a capability that many potential adversaries, including China and Russia, have in spades.

Black Skies will be followed later this year by the Red Skies exercise focused on “orbital warfare,” Bratton said. Next year, he added,…

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A hacker used a $25 custom-built tool to hack into SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system

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A $25 device that breaks into Starlink’s ‘Dishy’ system

Space has launched more than 3,000 satellites into low Earth orbit. Customers for the satellite internet service must pay a monthly fee of more than $100 as well as a hardware fee in excess of $500 to obtain the 19-inch wide “Dishy” satellite dish required for using the service.

Wouters developed a custom-made modchip to gain access to Dishy. According to Wired, this custom circuit board is attached to Dishy and it can be fairly easily made using off-the-shelf parts costing roughly $25 in total. Wouters has made the outline for how to build the modchip available on Github.

The custom-built device allows users to access Dishy’s software and it can launch an attack that causes a glitch, which hackers access locked parts of the system.

“The widespread availability of Starlink User Terminals (UT) exposes them to hardware hackers and opens the door for an attacker to freely explore the network,” Wouters wrote in the description for his briefing.

“Our attack results in an unfixable compromise of the Starlink [user terminal] and allows us to execute arbitrary code,” he continued. “The ability to obtain root access on the Starlink [user terminal] is a prerequisite to freely explore the Starlink network.”

SpaceX blocks cyberattacks at ‘eye-watering’ speed

SpaceX has already replied to Wouters’ warning about the flaw in its system by performing a software update that it believes should resolve the issue. However, according to Wouters the only way SpaceX can ensure others won’t gain access in a similar way is by creating a new version of Dishy’s main chip. It’s worth noting that Wouters didn’t share his findings to help others hack Starlink satellite dishes. Instead, he hopes it will help the private space firm to improve cybersecurity for its users.

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Russia downed satellite internet in Ukraine -Western officials

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  • US: Russian hack aimed at disrupting Ukrainian communications
  • UK: Hack was ‘deliberate and malicious’
  • EU: Attack on Viasat caused ‘indiscriminate’ outages
  • Russia routinely denies it carries out cyberattacks

NEWPORT, Wales, May 10 (Reuters) – Russia was behind a massive cyberattack against a satellite internet network that 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 (VSAT.O) KA-SAT network in late February took place just as Russian armour pushed into Ukraine. 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 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.

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The Viasat outage remains the most publicly visible cyberattack carried out since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in part 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 you unplug them and plug them back in and reboot and they come back,” the U.S. National Security Agency’s Director of Cybersecurity Rob Joyce told Reuters on the sidelines of a cybersecurity conference on Tuesday.

“They were down and down hard; they had to go back to the factory to be swapped out.”

The precise consequences of the hack on the Ukrainian battlefield 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. read more

The satellite modem sabotage caused a “huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war”, Ukrainian cybersecurity official Victor Zhora said in March. read more

In a statement, Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and…

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