A historical view of unconventional warfare during the beginning of the Ukraine conflict
Although it’s only been a few months since the start of the war in Ukraine, much has happened. In this series of releases EkaLore will consider contemporary issues around enterprises’ assumption of the “illusion of control”, the “use of deniability”, and the “presence of accountability”. Related concepts of “responsibility”, “transparency”, and “state agents or actors” will be included. These releases accept public or released statements (circa March – April 2022) as reported in major media for analysis here.
First, let’s consider war from the public statements of leaders, diplomats, and official statements. We’ll consider three key parties: the United States, Russia, and China along with other exemplary powers like India, UK, EU, and Japan.
The cyberattacks coincident with the Ukraine military activity will be explored as examples along with satellite, 5G, and international Internet services.
The details of the ViaSat Incident at the onset of active military actions in Ukraine provide clues for insights. Key to this incident are:
Clear beneficial effects for Russia
Lack of transparency by cyberattacked enterprises (with vague statements of national security agency involvements),
Assets cyberattacked are owned by a US enterprise, operated by an EU Enterprise, (spreading accountability and illusions of control), and deniability means there are no perpetrators (state actors or agents) to be held responsible.
Coincident with the “special operation” started by Russia in Ukraine the US-based carrier ViaSat was subject to a cyberattack against their KA-SAT satellite communications service reported to affect Ukraine, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The KA-Sat network was started by EU-based (Paris) EUTELSAT Communications with ViaSat as European Broadband Infrastructure in 2016. In 2020 ViaSat bought out EUTELSAT and took control of existing operations of EBI operations led by EUTELSAT for European and Mediterranean markets. EUTELSAT’s wide range of customers include some in Russia. The cyberattack was reported to effectively “brick” (make inoperable) satellite receivers and transmitters. ViaSat (whose customers include governments) said operations of other customer groups were not affected as the cyberattack was targeted at the user-terminal equipment previously selected by EUTELSAT as operating manager for KA-Sat. The effects of the cyberattack were to reduce communications capabilities for Ukrainian military and security services (reported on ProZorro, an official Ukrainian government procurement site).
The targeted ViaSat produced “Surf Beam 2 satellite modems” fail with no diagnostic lights on the units. Speculation has the EBI-managed units cyberattacked with network management operations forced-downloads where the bridged network (required for commercial Surf Beam 2 operations) distributed malware that could not be fixed by simple rebooting of the modems. Technicians will need physical direct hands-on to replace/reprovision units then locally configure (as a common 192.168.100.x network is default). The hands-on break/fix requirement places high demands on technicians and network provisioning. The cyberattack hacking of the management functions at EBI likely caused failures throughout their customers.
To ask the themes EkaLore will raise throughout this series:
Who was affected: Many enterprises with key effects felt in Ukraine.
Who was accountable for security: ViaSat as EBI under contracted EUTELSAT operations
Who was responsible for the cyberattack: Unacknowledged as no party has publicly claimed credit
The next post in the series will discuss what happened to OneWeb, co-owned by an international group of investors.
Read this post and more at www.ekalore.com/ars
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