Thousands of Internet users, including nearly 9,000 Orange subscribers, are deprived of the Internet in France and Europe due to a probable cyberattack on a satellite network, which occurred at the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
According to Orange, “nearly 9,000 subscribers” of a satellite internet service from its subsidiary Nordnet, in France, are deprived of the internet following a “cyber-event” which occurred on February 24 within Viasat, a American satellite operator of which he is the customer.
Eutelsat, parent company of the bigblu satellite internet service, also confirmed to AFP on Friday evening that around a third of the 40,000 bigblu subscribers in Europe (Germany, France, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Poland) were affected by the breakdown on Viasat.
In the United States, Viasat said on Wednesday that a “cyber event” had caused “a partial network outage” for customers “in Ukraine and elsewhere” in Europe dependent on its KA-SAT satellite. Viasat did not give more details, confining itself to indicating that “the police and state partners” had been notified and “were providing assistance” for the investigations. If the euphemism “cyber-event” left little doubt that it was a cyberattack, the fact was confirmed on Thursday by General Michel Friedling, who heads the French Space Command.
Nearly 6,000 wind turbines also affected
These disturbances also affect, in Germany and central Europe, 5,800 wind turbines with a total power of 11 gigawatts. “Due to a massive disruption of the satellite connection in Europe, remote monitoring and control of thousands of wind power converters is currently only possible to a limited extent,” said the manufacturer of these wind turbines, the German Enercon, this week in a press release Enercon specifies that the problems began on February 24, the first day of the invasion of Ukraine.
Military and cyber specialists fear that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will give rise to an outbreak of cyberattacks, a “cyber-Armageddon” with significant consequences for civilians in Ukraine and Russia, but also in the rest of the world, as a result of overflow or “splash”, according to the term used recently by a French military official.
For now, the worst-case scenario seems to have been avoided, with the observed attacks appearing contained in their effects and geographic scale. Cybersecurity companies have observed attacks in Ukraine with a new data-destroying virus, the real effects of which are little known. In Russia, institutional sites have been made inaccessible from abroad, to protect them from denial of service (DOS) attacks which regularly render them inoperative.