Q&A: Viasat Tests Satellite Resilience With AI as Cyber Expert Warns an Attack Could ‘Hurt an Entire Country’

The 2022 Russian cyberattack on Viasat's KA-SAT network exposed critical vulnerabilities in space-based communication infrastructure, causing widespread disruption across Ukraine and Europe — including disabling thousands of wind turbines and emergency services. The root cause reflects insufficient resilience testing, inadequate network segmentation between ground and space segments, and underestimated threat actors capable of targeting civilian-critical infrastructure below the threshold of open warfare. This matters because satellite communications underpin military coordination, financial systems, emergency services, and everyday civilian life, meaning a single targeted attack can cascade into a national crisis. Viasat's AI-assisted resilience testing initiative is a positive step, but it underscores that proactive adversarial simulation should have been standard practice long before an attack occurred.