Russia’s 2022 assault on Viasat’s satellite network, which silenced thousands of modems across Ukraine and Europe in the opening hours of the invasion, remains a template for attacking space infrastructure. A new AI-driven scanner now claims to close the kind of hole that attack exposed.
The startup behind it, Atalanta, calls the approach software understanding: pairing advanced mathematics with AI to hunt for weaknesses across code and internet-connected systems. The firm markets its new tool, Argo, as the first such scanner available for commercial purchase.
Argo is already being used to check the satellite communications network that Viasat operates, the same system broken in the 2022 assault, against new adversary tactics. A Viasat official said the past year of work with Atalanta produced a way to measure how well the network absorbs attacks.
Anjana Rajan, Atalanta’s chief executive, contends that legacy security methods no longer scale and that software understanding will be essential for building any U.S. system of consequence. The technology is also supporting the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, an effort to field autonomous nuclear reactors.
Greg Shannon, chief cybersecurity scientist at Idaho National Laboratory, predicts such tools will join standard development kits within a decade or two. He points out that DARPA has poured more than $2B into formal methods over roughly two decades, and that the Pentagon’s chief technology officer last year called the mathematics behind Atalanta’s work the future of military cybersecurity.
The release comes as government agencies warn that hackers, including Iranian groups, are increasingly targeting critical infrastructure.
