KA-SAT satellite network attack (2022)

On the night of 24 February 2022, about an hour before Russian troops entered Ukraine, attackers exploited a configuration flaw in the ground segment of a satellite communications network, KA-SAT, and pushed a wiper, since named AcidRain, to customers' modems. Tens of thousands of terminals were disabled, in Ukraine where they served notably for military and civilian communications, but also in several European countries. In Germany, some 5,800 wind turbines lost remote monitoring; they kept turning but could no longer be controlled. In May 2022, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States publicly attributed the attack to Russia. For cyber insurance, the case is the textbook example of collateral victims of a wartime operation. The German operators were not targets, were not in the attacked state, and yet suffered business interruption and hardware replacement costs. London market cyber war clauses, by distinguishing the impacted state from assets that merely suffer indirect effects, sought precisely to say whether such a loss is covered. The case also showed the cost of bricking: one malicious update is enough to turn a fleet of devices into scrap.