Space Cybersecurity Incident Response Framework: A Viasat Case Study

The restoration of space systems following failures has historically been precipitated by natural phenomena such as geomagnetic storms or unintentional software malfunctions and hardware issues. However, the advent of intentional cyber-attacks targeting space systems heralds a new era of incident response. This paper presents a first-hand account of the incident response to the February 2022 cyberattack on Viasat's KA-SAT network, which coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Lessons learned are highlighted and integrated into a proposed incident response framework for space system service providers.