Just an hour before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, “Russian government hackers targeted the American satellite company Viasat.” MIT Technology Review reports the news, which has been confirmed by officials from the United States, the EU and the United Kingdom. “The operation caused an immediate and significant loss of communications for the Ukrainian army in the first days of the war,” writes Patrick Howell O’Neill, explaining that the cyber attack on the US space player “on February 24” was marked with “a destructive “wiper”- Malware that “launched” against Viasat modems and routers and quickly wiped all data on the system”.
“The machines then rebooted and were permanently disabled. Thousands of terminals were effectively destroyed in this way.” Mit Technology Review also reports that “the Viasat cyberattack is the largest known hack of the war,” according to “Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a threat researcher at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.” It is also one of the earliest examples of how cyberattacks can be targeted and programmed to augment military forces on the ground by disrupting and even destroying technology used by enemy forces.