- Hackers are crippling tens of thousands of satellite modems in Ukraine and across Europe continue to target Viasat Inc VSAT as it struggled to bring back users online, Reuters reports.
- U.S. analysts held Russia's military intelligence agency responsible for the attack. A cyberattack remotely disabled Viasat's satellite modems just as Russian forces pushed into Ukraine on February 24.
- The hackers launched a parallel attack at almost precisely the same time with "high volumes of focused, malicious traffic," which was still ongoing.
- Reuters writes that the intruders exploited a misconfigured virtual private networking device to gain remote access to the management network for Viasat's KA-SAT satellite run by Italy's Skylogic.
- The hackers sent rogue commands from inside the network to tens of thousands of modems, overwriting critical chunks of data in the device's memory and rendering them inoperable.
- Viasat saw repeated attempts from the hackers to alter that pattern to test those new mitigations and defenses.
- Nearly 30,000 new modems were already shipped to distributors to bring customers back online.
- Russian hackers also scanned the systems of energy companies and other critical infrastructure in the U.S., Reuters reports.
- The threat from Russia in a criminal sense, in the nation-state sense, was very real and current, an FBI director admitted.
- The director added that the instances of Russian scanning networks in the U.S. energy sector had increased recently to try and understand a company's defenses to exploit its possible vulnerabilities.
- In 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to put away specific critical infrastructure "off-limits" to cyberattacks.
- Price Action: VSAT shares are trading higher by 0.04% at $49.36 on the last check Wednesday.
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