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Showing posts from March, 2022

VIASAT incident: from speculation to technical details.

  34 days after the incident, yesterday Viasat published a statement providing some technical details about the attack that affected tens of thousands of its SATCOM terminals. Also yesterday, I eventually had access to two Surfbeam2 modems: one was targeted during the attack and the other was in a working condition. Thank you so much to the person who disinterestedly donated the attacked modem. I've been closely covering this issue since the beginning, providing a  plausible theory based on the information that was available at that time, and my experience in this field. Actually, it seems that this theory was pretty close to what really happened. Fortunately, now we can move from just pure speculation into something more tangible, so I dumped the flash memory for both modems (Spansion S29GL256P90TFCR2 ) and the differences were pretty clear. In the following picture you can see 'attacked1.bin', which belongs to the targeted modem and 'fw_fixed.bin', coming from t

SATCOM terminals under attack in Europe: a plausible analysis.

------ Update 03/12/2022 Reuters has published new information on this incident, which initially matches the proposed scenario. You can find the  update  at the bottom of this post. ------ February 24th: at the same time Russia initiated a full-scale attack on Ukraine, tens of thousands of KA-SAT SATCOM terminals suddenly  stopped  working in several european countries: Germany, Ukraine, Greece, Hungary, Poland...Germany's Enercon moved forward and acknowledged that approximately 5800 of its wind turbines, presumably those remotely operated via a SATCOM link in central Europe, had lost contact with their  SCADA server .  In the affected countries, a significant part of the customers of Eutelsat's domestic broadband service were also unable to access Internet.  From the very beginning Eutelsat and its parent company Viasat, stated that the issue was being investigated as a cyberattack. Since then, details have been scarcely provided but few days ago I came across a really inter