Officials in the United States and Ukraine have long since believe that Russia is responsible for the cyberattack on Viasat, but has not officially “attributed” the incident to Russia. While American officials have long since reached the conclusion, they want European nations to take the lead because the attack has resonated greatly in Europe but not in the United States.
The statements released on Tuesday stopped short of naming a specific Russian-sponsored hacking group that orchestrated the attack, an unusual omission given the routine disclosure of information about specific intelligence services by the United States. may be responsible for the attacks, in part to demonstrate their visibility to the Russian government.
“We have been and will continue to work closely with relevant government and law enforcement agencies as part of the ongoing investigation,” said Dan Bleier, a spokesman for Viasat. Mandiant, the cybersecurity company hired by Viasat to investigate the matter, declined to comment on its findings.
But researchers at the cybersecurity company SentinelOne believes that the Viasat hack is likely the work of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit. The malware used in the attack, called AcidRain, shares significant similarities with other malware previously used by GRU, SentinelOne said the researchers.
Unlike its predecessor malware, called VPNFilter and built to destroy specific computer systems, AcidRain was created as a multi-purpose tool that can easily be used against many target, the researchers said. In 2018, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that the Russian GRU was responsible for creating VPNFilter Malware.
The AcidRain malware is “a very generic solution, in the scariest sense of the word,” said Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a principal threat researcher at SentinelOne. “They could do this tomorrow, and if they wanted to do a supply chain attack against a router or modem in the US, AcidRain would work.”
US officials have warned that Russia could carry out a cyberattack against critical US infrastructure and called on companies to beef up their online defenses. The US State Department also said that the US has also assisted Ukraine in detecting and responding to Russian cyberattacks.
