WASHINGTON — The biggest known cyberattack of the Ukraine war happened more than a year ago when Russian hackers targeted satellite modems and knocked Viasat’s KA-SAT customers offline in Ukraine and other parts of Europe.
Viasat, a global communications firm based in Carlsbad, California, used the lessons from that attack and intelligence data from the U.S. government to develop a cybersecurity solution that can be applied to its entire global network.
The company earlier this month introduced an “intrusion detection service” it developed using classified U.S. government threat intelligence to identify threats on the network, Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems, told SpaceNews on the sidelines of the Satellite 2023 conference.
“Unfortunately this capability was not deployed on KA-SAT at the event that happened in 2022,” Miller said. The new service, known as a “zero trust architecture” is now deployed on the company’s own network and on critical U.S. infrastructure managed by the Department of Homeland Security.
“We’re starting to get some very interesting data,” Miller said. “It’s hard to say categorically that this has stopped a cyber attack, but we have caught things and stopped things that potentially wouldn’t have been stopped by other tools.”
Unlike traditional cybersecurity techniques that focus on perimeter defense and access control, a zero-trust architecture assumes all devices are potential threats. “We’re always looking at behavioral patterns,” Miller said. “Does it look different than normal? Does that look like a malicious thing? And we’re often able to find things that would be considered zero-day attacks.”
