§22.4 Three practical examples

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Three examples from the war in Ukraine show how cyber and EW intertwine in practice.

1. Viasat KA-SAT, 24 February 2022. On the morning of the invasion, tens of thousands of satellite modems on the KA-SAT network went down, including those of Ukrainian military users. The satellite was not attacked, and nothing was jammed. Attackers entered the management network through a misconfigured VPN access and sent the modems commands that made them unusable; probably with wiper malware (AcidRain). The EU, the UK and the US attributed the attack to Russia in May 2022. A side effect: in Germany, thousands of wind turbines lost their remote control connection. The lesson: a SATCOM service is only as strong as its ground segment (Spazio & SATCOM-EW), and cyber effects do not respect borders.

2. Watching the opponent's drone. Many FPV drones transmit their video unencrypted and analogue. Whoever finds the frequency (ESM, From pulse to threat: the ESM chain) can watch, with a simple receiver, what the opposing pilot sees: where he is searching, and sometimes where he takes off. Ukrainian units do this on a large scale. According to Ukrainian groups, hackers also got into accounts of Russian drone pilots and followed live video for months; this has not been independently confirmed. The difference between the two methods is the difference between EW and cyber: one listens in on the spectrum, the other breaks into the system.

3. A false picture of the world through the receiver. GNSS spoofing (GNSS e guerra di navigazione) makes a receiver calculate a wrong position. The means is a radio signal, the effect an information effect: the system works normally, but with wrong data. Around the Baltic and the Black Sea this also affects civil aviation.