Russia’s space chief says hacking satellites ‘a cause for war’
Yet Dmitry Rogozin denied a report that a cyber group had shut down satellite operations.
A top Russian space official said any cyber attacks on the country’s satellites would be considered “a cause for war,” while denying that a control center had been taken down by hackers.
The warning followed claims by a group of hackers that it shut down the satellite operations of Roscosmos, Russia’s civilian space agency.
While the claim has not been verified, it raises the prospect that the war in Ukraine could not only spill over Europe’s borders but also the global lifeline of military and civilian space systems orbiting the Earth, which national security officials have been warning are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks.
“If you get to a point where you are hitting critical systems, you risk escalation,” said Chris Painter, the former top government coordinator for cyber policy.
For example, he said “blinding nuclear command and control or early warning satellites could be very destabilizing.”
But he also said he has been a bit surprised that cyber attacks have not featured more prominently in the week-old Ukraine conflict.
“They haven’t played the role people thought they would,” he said in an interview. “We may see more of it in the coming days.”
The purported attack on Roscosmos definitely got the attention of leaders in Moscow when hackers asserted they were able to interrupt access to satellites images.
“The Russian Space Agency sure does love their satellite imaging,” the anonymous NB65 wrote late Tuesday. “Better yet, they sure do love their Vehicle Monitoring System.”
It went on to claim that the system’s “credentials were rotated and the server is shut down.”
But officially Russia dismissed such claims.
“The information of these scammers and petty swindlers is not true,” Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin tweeted on Wednesday. “All our space activity control centers are operating normally.”
Then, in an interview with the Interfax news agency, Rogozin also warned that “offlining the satellites of any country is actually a casus belli, a cause for war,” Reuters reported.
But military officials have long seen the cyber threat to military and civilian space systems as another front; the U.S. Space Force, for example, warned last year that satellites get hacked on nearly a daily basis.
“That’s probably one of the biggest potential exposed flanks,” Col. Benjamin Ogden, the space operations officer at the Army War College, said at a symposium on Wednesday hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He cited the wide-ranging reliance on satellite communications and other services for the civilian population as well as military forces.
“When you start adding commercial companies that are now contributing to this data — this aggregation of data, passing of data — it is no longer held behind military closed doors,” he said. “It’s kind of now more public, if you will. So people who have cyber capabilities can tap into this and do some significant damage.”
On Monday, U.S. satellite communications company Viasat said it was investigating a partial outage on its European KA-SAT network that it suspects may have been the result of a cyber attack.