Russian Hackers Continue To Target Viasat In Ukraine, Europe; Hackers Also Targetting US Energy, Critical Infra - Viasat (NASDAQ:VSAT)

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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