Photo: LightRocket
When Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine in February, Elon Musk began shipping Starlink dishes to the country so people would be able to stay online. Starlink has launched nearly 2,000 satellites into orbit, which are capable of beaming internet back to Earth, providing access to high-speed internet in remote areas of the world.
Since February, over 10,000 units have been delivered, giving Ukrainian forces an edge as they battle Russian troops.
Russia responded by trying to jam the signal to keep Ukrainians from accessing the internet. However, Starlink engineers and programmers quickly responded to the cyberattacks and managed to thwart them. Musk confirmed the attempts to block Starlink in March and said that his company had stopped them.
On Wednesday (April 20), Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, praised Starlink's rapid response and provided more details on how the company managed to deal with the Russian interference.
"It was eye-watering to see the news report that the Russians were trying to jam Starlink and that almost the next day—I think it was, in fact, the next day—Starlink had slung a line of code and had fixed it. And suddenly, that was not effective anymore," Tremper said during the C4ISRNET Conference.
Tremper said the Pentagon must learn from Starlink and be ready to quickly respond to cyberattacks.
"There's a really interesting case study to look at the agility that Starlink had in their ability to address that problem," he said. "In the way that Starlink was able to upgrade when a threat showed up, we need to be able to have that agility."