Facing up to cyber challenges
Cybersecurity is failing to keep pace with a generational upheaval in global politics and economics that will take decades to play out, according to the head of the UK's signals intelligence agency. GCHQ director, Sir Jeremy Fleming, said gaps in national strategies are being painfully exposed and more investment is urgently needed. Fleming added that commentary about the absence of a major Russian cyber attack as part of its invasion of Ukraine misses the point. "Whilst some people look for cyber Pearl Harbours, it was never our understanding that a catastrophic cyber attack was central to Russia’s use of offensive cyber or to their military doctrine,” he said. While "lots of cyber" has been seen in the conflict, Fleming emphasised that a key focus for Moscow has been disinformation, most prominently within Russia itself.
Details are emerging about the most high-profile cyber attack seen so far during the war, which disabled thousands of satellite terminals in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe. Viasat said attackers took advantage of a misconfigured VPN appliance to gain remote access to a "trusted" section of the network used to manage the KA-SAT satellite network. This allowed malicious commands to be sent to modems in Ukraine and several other European countries. "These destructive commands overwrote key data in flash memory on the modems, rendering them unable to access the network, but not permanently unusable," Viasat said. SentinelOne says the devices were wiped with software linked to a destructive Russian tool. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the attacks on Viasat are continuing.
