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> (and the impossibility to obtain said equipment for the average Joe).

when I worked on similar problems some years ago, we found out that certain radios were used across sectors with basically the same ucLinux kernels and toolchains, bootloaders, and SoCs. I agree with the "internal VLAN" assessment to a point, as these networks tend to backhaul their admin channel / control plane messaging back to their vendor.

The hardcoded credentials issue was the easiest win, where the firmware signing was actually not bad, but injecting packets over the point to point radio connections depended on whether both encryption was enabled, and some primitives implementation issues that I have no doubt any serious cyber operations group would have also found.

With this (speculative) radio packet of death, you could fly a spyplane over the region at super sonic speeds and cause the terminals to go dark - which would explain the relatively simultaneous / sequential failures and the physical path of the outages, which would be detectable in the monitoring data.

Strategically, it's the perfect signal and warning to any country looking to interfere, and it doesn't cost very much. Maybe it's nothing, but with Russia it's never nothing.




> With this (speculative) radio packet of death, you could fly a spyplane over the region at super sonic speeds

That could work in Ukraine, but a spy plane above Germany would have made national news.


Fair assessment. I assumed spyplane because it also affected Italy and Greece, so there was a long arc of a flight path. It's possible it could have been the orbit of a russian electronic warfare satellite as well, as if you have a transmitter on it, encoding radio packets of death against poorly maintained linux kernel forks (hugely assuming that's what the terminals ran) is as trivial as loading a metasploit payload. I'm well into speculative fiction, but casting magic spells that stop machinery en masse isn't magic at all - and well within the capabilities of armchair admirals of electronic warfare who read and post on HN.

It would be interesting to see if there was any timestamp data about the order in which the terminals failed, as that would yield the flight path evidence, or indicate the presence of local transmitters in those regions, or if it were async, an internet based attack.

Reality is, the gear that runs critical infrastructure is still a joke, and I've said before that western exposure to cyber vulnerability will cause the US/NATO to hesitate in responding to Russian and Chinese aggression because they have to take on that domestic political risk of infrastructure failure, and in conflict, often hesitation is sufficient. Weakness invites predators, and here we are.




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