FBI and CISA warn over threats to satellite communications networks

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Company (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned satellite communications community vendors to beef up stability. 

The CISA and FBI on Thursday mentioned in a joint advisory that they are “knowledgeable of possible threats” to U.S. and intercontinental satellite interaction (SATCOM) networks.   

“Successful intrusions into SATCOM networks could produce additional possibility for SATCOM network shopper environments,” the organizations be aware.

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The advisory is made up of mitigation actions for both of those SATCOM operators and their buyers to take amid US and European investigations into a big outage impacting Viasat’s world wide web assistance for fixed broadband customers in Ukraine and elsewhere on its European KA-SAT satellite network. 

The outage began on February 28, coinciding with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The exact working day German strength agency Enercon documented distant communications to 5,800 wind turbines was down due to a satellite outage.    

Reuters on March 11 reported that the National Safety Agency, France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI, and Ukrainian intelligence ended up investigating an assault that disrupted Ukraine broadband satellite access that coincided with Russia’s invasion on February 28. 

As element of CISA’s Shields Up initiative, the companies are calling on SATCOM operators and their shoppers to “noticeably reduced their threshold for reporting and sharing indications of destructive cyber exercise.”

CISA launched Shields Up in February and cited US fears that sanctions in opposition to Russia heightened the risk of cyberattacks on US crucial infrastructure and organizations. 

The organizations are recommending SATCOM operators overview the security of communications to and from conclude-consumer terminals, and to assessment the Workplace of the Director of National Intelligence’s February report, which details Russia’s anti-satellite technologies, which include directed electrical power weapons, for jamming civilian and armed forces satellite GPS and conversation companies. 

Notably, CISA also warns shoppers to overview IT supply relationships and the NSA’s January 2022 suggestions for preserving really tiny-aperture terminal (VSAT) networks.  

The NSA explained to CNN this week that it’s “knowledgeable of reports of a prospective cyber-attack that disconnected hundreds of quite modest-aperture terminals that get data to and from a satellite network.” 

Viasat told CNN the “partial outage” was brought about by a “deliberate, isolated and external cyber occasion” and included that the community was now “stabilized”. 

Having said that, Netblocks on Wednesday reported that Viasat’s KA-SAT network remained “seriously impacted” 18 times immediately after the outages started.

ℹ️ Update: Satellite operator Viasat’s KA-SAT community in Europe remains heavily impacted 18 times right after it was specific by an apparent cyberattack, a single of many incidents noticed as Russia released its invasion of Ukraine on the morning of 24 Feb 🛰

📰 https://t.co/S0qJQ7CbNv pic.twitter.com/nLNlquYQF9

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) March 15, 2022

Amongst lots of other recommendations CISA indicates SATCOM suppliers contemplate:

• Applying secure strategies for authentication, together with multi-variable authentication where doable for all accounts employed to obtain, control, and/or administer networks. 
• Using and imposing potent, intricate passwords. Evaluation password guidelines to assure they align with the most recent NIST rules. Do not use default qualifications or weak passwords. Audit accounts and credentials: take out terminated or needless accounts modify expired credentials.
• Imposing principle of the very least privilege by authorization guidelines.