Is there a plausible explanation for who would do this, besides Russia?
Is Viasat/Eutelsat a particularly good target for this for some reason (seems more like Iridium is used in these scenarios).
Not sure at all if this was the intended/primary target, but Europe is certainly scrambling for every Watt at the moment...
Also note that KA-SAT/Viasat and Eutelsat seem to be different platforms. I've seen reports of services based on the former being affected (e.g. SkyDSL [2]), but not the latter (Konnect), so far.
I was also surprised to learn that Ka-band based stationary consumer satellite internet services seem to be using (mostly) plain DOCSIS as the protocol. That possibly introduces its own share of vulnerabilities due to OTA updates/provisioning.
[1] https://thestack.technology/viasat-ka-sat-outage-cyber/
[2] https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Thousands-in-Fra...
This is not a court of law, proof is not what is missing to declare a war against Russia. They have a credible nuclear deterent, that is why war is not declared against them by other countries.
It is in fact a very sweet idea to think that a war declaration depends on meeting or not meeting some evidentiary standard.
Nobody “declares” wars anymore. If Russia were believed to be responsible for this, it would make it politically feasible to attack their critical infrastructure through targeted (plausibly deniable) cyber attacks.
Sure. And this consent can be produced when there is a need for it. “Proof” is not the missing component.
That American basketball player who the Russians detained? Casus belli. The cyber attacks? Casus belli. Shelled civilians? Casus belli. The NATO country cargo ships which got hit and sunk? Casus belli.
These are just the ones I can think of. A proper state aparatus can come up with many more and probably even better ones. Government officials will leak the background, solemn faced politicians will demand justice while friendly journalist will write up the whole thing in the most hearth wrenching way. If they want to they can.
So why do they don’t want to? Is it because the Russian army is so powerfull that we think we can’t overpower them? No. Is it because the Russian air defences are so advanced that they cannot be picked apart? No. So what is it which makes the west avoid a direct confrontation with Russia? Why are they doing this strange dance of supplying weapons to Ukraine and hurting Russia with sanctions, but not directly engaging with them troop-to-troop? It’s the Russian nukes.
> You misunderstood, or simply ignored the word “public”.
I don’t think so. You won’t “prove” anything to the public through detailed technological explanations. A fig leaf of deniability might be an interesting roadblock in a criminal prosecution where things have to be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt”. In a situation where there is a governmental will to engage in a peacekeeping mission (read: send troops to fck the Russians up) the evidentiary level is “can we find an authorative sounding voice in the whole government who can tell the right sod story to enough guilable journalist to sell the people on it”. That is such a low level of “proof” that one might as well assume it can be met nearly always.
Journalist won’t pour over the attack binaries using Ghidra to make an assesment about the relative probabilities that it has the signatures of being created by this or that advanced persistent threat group. The ones who would demand that level of rigour before publishing won’t get the scoop. The ones who are selected to spread the message will have a lovely hour with a very charismatic “expert” who will walk them through just enough of the detail to sound right but not to get bogged down in unnecesary complications. This chat will get translated into a single line in their article, maybe something like “experts at the National Security Agency matched the unique signatures of the cyberweapon to the advanced persistent threat group Tippsy Bears, a known front of the Russian Federation.” Followed by two pages of hearth wrenching human angle story about innocents suffering needlesly. That is the “proof” the public might get.
If a democratic country wants to go to war it needs a reason that’s beloved by a large number of people.
Even if attribution was possible and confirmed, nobody wants to start a nuclear war over a cyberattack.
After the WMDs and 17 intelligence agencies agree fiascos, among countless others, I'm beginning to lean on the side of the media being able to sell snow to an eskimo.
I know this is US-centric and lots of europe/other parts of the world were much more skeptical of the WMD claims at the time.
Before people politically flame me, I mention the "17 intelligence agencies" for 2 reasons 1) getting 17 people to agree on anything is impossible, getting 17 gigantic bureaucracies larger each than most governments to agree on anything is asinine. 2) most of the evidence, if you read the redacted report, was trivially forgeable so as to be pointless in determining actual responsibility. "we found cyrillic characters in the code, only could have come from russia!"
I learnt during the Falkland conflict when the General Belgrano was sunk, some countries like the UK will ignore rules when it threatens them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_General_Belgrano#Later_pol...
Churchill is another UK leader who chose to ignore rules or international agreements and I'm well aware criminals dont care about rules either.
This is just the Fog of War that is not a War.
"The [turbines] affected remain in operation and are producing clean renewable energy. ... they will operate in automatic mode and are fundamentally capable of self-contained and independent regulation."
This situation is an unbelievable clusterfuck.
[1]: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/windkraft-industri...
The US, perhaps acting on intelligence preceding the Viasat attack, provided Zelenskywith an Iridium 9575A.
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-ne...
Seriously?! Did the president hire my parents to set up his satellite phone? I refuse to believe that a nation state doesn't have at least a couple of techs on their payroll with decent command of English. If this is true then it's just embarrassing on so many levels and I'm really afraid of how Ukraine has a chance at winning this war.
Any engineer could accidentally do it... I can totally imagine the release engineer accidentally pushing the dev version, only to realise later that the dev version doesn't have quite the right config to connect for example.
Blaming it on a cyber attack is a lot less bad than saying "whoops, we bricked everyone's modems".
A plausibly deniable exploit like that is probably orders of magnitude more expensive, and the timing is suspicious enough that it's probably not even worth trying. In any case, it's not like it's trivial to attribute (beyond reasonable doubt) a "transparent" cyber attack either.
If your objective is to disable the devices like they've done, attacking the "easy" layer is enough so why waste time on unnecessary complexity? Of course they might well have also done recon on the satellite side and collected valuable data they can use in the next round.
Also, most satellites are intentionally as dumb as possible, just a "bent pipe" transponder, putting all the complexity on the ground stations which are easier to service if something goes wrong. There might not be much to do on the satellite itself.
All geostationary satellites need to be capable of at least some station-keeping to correct for drift, move them to other service areas, or move them to a graveyard orbit at their end of life. (Unlike LEO, GEO satellites don't carry enough fuel for de-orbiting, and friction is essentially nonexistent at that altitude.)
That layer of commands is hopefully very well protected.
Typically some form of HMAC authentication. You can read about it in the CCSDS Blue Book.
Also, the affected ground stations are in Germany, the satellite belongs to a US company.
The current generation of satellites themselves generally do nothing to the data stream - for each of the dozens of spot beams they're transmitting, they generally just take an RF signal from the ground station (multiplexed in various ways up to the satellite) and convert the frequency. Same with the receive path just in reverse.
The actual modulation/demodulation all happens at the ground station. This is because they expect modem technology will improve, but the satellite has to be able to work for 25-30 years. (Though in the industry they are talking about putting more and more 'software defined' functionality on the satellites, but again this will mostly have to go via their secure systems at the ground station, not from the terminals)
So there's basically no way to interact with any 'satellite firmware' unless you're in a very specific location (near their ground station) with extremely specialised gear.