On Wednesday, Viasat said that a cyber-incident had resulted in a partial network outage for customers using its KA-SAT satellite in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe.
Digital Desk: Due to a possible cyberattack at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, thousands of internet users across Europe have been knocked offline, reports said.
According to Orange, following a cyber incident on February 24 at Viasat, roughly 9,000 subscribers of a satellite internet service provided by its subsidiary Nordnet in France are without internet.
The outage on Viasat affected almost one-third of bigblu's 40,000 users throughout Europe, including Germany, France, Hungary, Greece, Italy, and Poland, according to Eutelsat, the parent company of bigblu satellite internet service.
On Wednesday, Viasat said that a cyber-incident had resulted in a partial network outage for customers using its KA-SAT satellite in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe.
Viasat added that police and state partners had been alerted and were assisting with the inquiry.
General Michel Friedling, the commander of France's Space Command, confirmed that a cyberattack had occurred.
"For several days, shortly after the start of operations, we had a satellite network that covered Europe and Ukraine in particular, which was the victim of a cyberattack, with tens of thousands of terminals that were rendered inoperable immediately after the attack," Friedling said, clarifying that he was referring to a civilian network called Viasat.
The outages also brought down 5,800 wind turbines with a total output of 11 gigawatts across Germany and Central Europe, Friedling added.
"Remote monitoring and control of thousands of wind power converters are currently only possible to a limited extent due to a massive disruption of the satellite connection in Europe. The problems began on February 24, the first day of the invasion of Ukraine," said Germany's manufacturer Enercon.
"The wind turbines are not in danger; they continue to produce energy but can no longer be reset remotely if necessary," Enercon added.
According to the German daily Handelsblatt, a report by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security indicated that a cyberattack might have caused the outages.
Meanwhile, Military and cyber experts fear that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict would erupt in cyberattacks, resulting in a cyber-Armageddon with severe consequences for civilians in Ukraine and Russia, as well as the rest of the world, due to a spillover effect.
However, a worst-case situation appears to have been avoided so far, as the attacks appear limited in geographical scope.
Moreover, cybersecurity firms have detected the Ukraine attack that uses a new data-destroying virus, the full extent of which is unknown.
Reportedly, Institutional websites in Russia were made unavailable from outside the country to protect them from denial of service (DoS) attacks, which rendered them unworkable regularly.
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