Viasat Traces Outage to Exploit of VPN Misconfiguration

Tens of thousands of modems were knocked offline in central Europe at nearly the same time Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. See Also: Third Party Risk: Lessons on Log4j The outage affected infrastructure run by communications company Viasat, based in Carlsbad, California. Four days later, the company reported that it was investigating the outage, which it says affected “fixed broadband customers” (see: Russia May Have Caused Widespread Satellite Network Outage). On March 17, the U.S. government warned that it is “aware of possible threats to U.S. and international satellite communication networks.” So far, neither the U.S. nor the Ukrainian government have attributed the attack to any individual or nation-state, although Russia or a close ally remain obvious suspects.