Recall back when the Russians infiltrated Viasat’s satellite modems and was able to interrupt mission in Ukraine and some locations in Europe. Well, Viasat has been developing a threat-detection tools that could be used on their entire network, however, the tool was not deployed on the incident spacecraft (KA-SAT).
This new tool that is developed uses the “zero-trust approach” with detecting network threats. What is the zero-trust approach, it is where the system would assume that all devices are potential threats to itself or the system. With this new tool it should be able to be more resilient towards cyber attacks and threats towards their systems.
Collaborating with Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, they were able to progressively reinforce the system and increase its capabilities to identify and detect potential threats. The tool is able to perform these identification and detection patterns by utilizing the classified threat intelligence from the DHS and their own in-house database. Since the deployment of the tool, the tool has already identified threats and was able to prevent further cyber-attacks towards the systems. In addition, to increase robustness Viasat also used machine-learning algorithms to be able to further advance the tool against data collected from their very own network.