https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-russia-viasat-hack-ukraine/
"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.
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
disruptions affected providers Bigblu Broadband Plc in the UK and NordNet AB in
France, as well as utility systems that monitor thousands of wind turbines in
Germany. The most critical affected Ukraine: Several thousand satellite systems
that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government depended on were all down,
making it much tougher for the military and intelligence services to coordinate
troop and drone movements in the hours after the invasion."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 33 Issue 64:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33/64#subj21
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
