There would now be cyber collateral victims in France in the war in Ukraine. Subscribers of the operator Nordnet, a subsidiary of Orange, and those of Bigblu, which belongs to Eutelsat. But this only concerns those who use the Internet access service provided by the KA-SAT satellite, which has been down since February 24.
[Internet Satellite]?️⚠️ We are experiencing a general malfunction on the KA SAT satellite connection service.
The teams are mobilized to resolve this incident as soon as possible.
thank you for your understanding pic.twitter.com/U4jd9zwcqP— Nordnet ? (@NordnetOFFICIEL) February 24, 2022
An outage caused by the Russian DDoS attack
This satellite has belonged to the American company Viasat since its acquisition in 2020 from Eutelsat. It is Viasat which suspects the Russians to be at the origin of the problem.
The failure of the KA-SAT satellite was allegedly caused by the Russian denial of service attack which mainly hit Ukrainian banks and government sites. KA-SAT provides Internet access in Eastern Europe but also throughout the continent and in the Mediterranean in general.
Few affected users
On the side of Bigblu, the people concerned would be very few. But the operator does not wish to communicate a figure. Nordnet claims for its part that less than 9,000 of its subscribers would be affected. The operator assured us that its other satellite Internet access offers were not affected.
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Viasat has not yet been able to restore service. Nor Nordnet, which is trying to restart the boxes of its French subscribers without success. We contacted Viasat to find out what workarounds were being considered to restore Internet access. We only got a general answer on the problem:
“Viasat is experiencing a partial network outage, which is impacting internet service for fixed broadband customers in Ukraine and elsewhere on our European KA-SAT network. Our investigation into the outage is continuing, but so far we believe it was caused by a cyber attack. We are investigating and analyzing our European network and systems to identify its cause and are taking additional precautions to avoid further impacts while we attempt to restore service for affected customers. Law enforcement and government partners have been notified and are participating in the ongoing investigation, alongside a third-party cybersecurity company. The investigation is ongoing, but to date customer data has not been compromised.”