(Washington, 19 August 2026) — When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, one of its first acts of aggression was not a missile strike but a cyberattack — one that disabled thousands of satellite modems across Ukraine and several European countries within hours, severing communications at a moment of maximum vulnerability. That incident exposed a dangerous gap in the defence of critical satellite communication infrastructure, one that commercial cybersecurity tools at the time were ill-equipped to close. Reportedly, Atalanta, a cybersecurity company, was developed precisely to address that kind of vulnerability — and has now released a commercially available AI-assisted tool designed to prevent such attacks from succeeding again.
The Long-Standing Vulnerability in Satellite Communication Security Continues to Trouble Critical Infrastructure Operators
The February 2022 attack on Viasat’s satellite network was not an isolated curiosity — it was a demonstration of how exposed critical communication systems can be when adversaries coordinate geopolitical aggression with precision cyberattacks. Within minutes of Russia’s ground forces mobilising, hackers had rendered tens of thousands of satellite modems inoperable, disrupting not only Ukrainian military communications but also civilian networks and connected systems across Europe, including wind farm operators in Germany.
For operators of satellite communications networks and other critical infrastructure, the incident crystallised a problem that had been building for years: the tools available to test and harden these systems against sophisticated cyberattacks were fundamentally inadequate. Existing vulnerability assessment methods could not keep pace with the complexity and scale of modern network architecture, leaving operators unable to verify in any mathematically rigorous way whether their systems were truly secure.
The threat has only intensified since. Multiple United States government agencies have issued warnings in 2026 that Iranian state-sponsored hackers are actively targeting water and wastewater systems, power grids, and other critical infrastructure — broadening the cyberwarfare theatre well beyond the conflict in Ukraine.
The Underlying Reasons Are More Complex Than Expected — and the Tools Have Not Kept Up
The persistence of this vulnerability in satellite communication security and broader critical infrastructure defence is not the result of a lack of effort. In fact, at its core, the problem reflects a fundamental mismatch between the scale of modern software complexity and the analytical methods used to examine it.
Legacy cybersecurity tools rely primarily on pattern-matching and known-threat databases — approaches that are effective against established attack signatures but largely blind to novel or zero-day vulnerabilities hidden deep within software logic. As satellite networks and critical systems have grown more complex, with millions of lines of code governing interconnected components, the surface area for potential compromise has expanded far beyond what manual audits or conventional automated scanners can comprehensively evaluate.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, identified this gap decades ago and has invested well over US$2 billion (approximately RM8.13 billion) across various programmes to advance what researchers call “formal methods” — a mathematical approach to software verification. Those investments, sustained over nearly two decades, created the scientific foundation for a new generation of tools. Until recently, however, no commercially available product had translated that research into a deployable system for private-sector operators.
Facing Critical Infrastructure Cyberattacks, Existing Market Solutions Fall Short of What Operators Need
The cybersecurity industry has not been passive in the face of escalating threats. Organisations have deployed endpoint detection systems, network monitoring platforms, penetration testing services, and AI-powered threat intelligence feeds. Each of these solutions addresses part of the problem.
Penetration testing, for instance, can identify known weaknesses but depends heavily on human expertise and is inherently limited in scope — a team of analysts cannot manually audit every component of a large satellite communication network within any practical timeframe. AI-powered threat detection tools improve response times once an attack is underway, but they are reactive by design. Threat intelligence feeds catalogue known adversarial tactics, yet by definition they cannot anticipate entirely new attack vectors.
The result is that operators of satellite systems and other critical infrastructure have been left with a patchwork of defences, each useful in isolation but collectively unable to provide the kind of comprehensive, mathematically verifiable assurance that a network is hardened against attack. The 2022 Viasat incident demonstrated exactly what that gap looks like when exploited at scale.
Atalanta Was Created to Address Precisely This Gap in Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity
Against this backdrop, Atalanta has released “Argo” — a product built around what the company calls “software understanding,” a methodology that combines advanced formal mathematics with artificial intelligence to analyse software and Internet-connected systems for vulnerabilities in a more comprehensive and verifiable manner than any previously commercially available tool.
The technology is not theoretical. Argo was instrumental in securing Viasat’s satellite communications network in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian hacking attack. Viasat’s chief of cyber strategy, Nick Saunders, confirmed that working with Atalanta over the past year, the company developed the capability to understand, with mathematical backing, how its systems are more resilient against future attacks — and to produce the mathematical proof to support that claim.
Atalanta CEO and co-founder Anjana Rajan stated directly: “The tools and techniques of yesterday do not scale for today and ‘software understanding’ is going to be the path forward for anyone building a system of consequence for the United States.”
Argo’s applications extend beyond satellite communications. Atalanta’s technology has been selected for the Genesis Mission, the U.S. Department of Energy’s programme to develop autonomous nuclear reactors — one of the most demanding cybersecurity environments in existence. Greg Shannon, chief cybersecurity scientist at the government’s Idaho National Laboratory, assessed that tools of this kind will eventually become standard across all new system development. “In a decade or two, I would expect it to be just part of the standard development tool kits,” Shannon said.
The Pentagon’s own chief technology officer, Emil Michael, endorsed the underlying mathematics at a Darpa software conference last year, stating that he wanted Atalanta’s mathematical approach to “become the DoD’s gold standard” for cybersecurity — a signal that formal-methods-based verification is moving from defence research into operational doctrine.
Frequently Asked Questions About Atalanta and the Argo Cybersecurity Tool
What is Atalanta and what does the company do? Atalanta is a cybersecurity company that develops AI-assisted tools for identifying and closing vulnerabilities in software and Internet-connected systems, with a particular focus on critical infrastructure including satellite communication networks, nuclear facilities, and defence systems.
What is “Argo” and how does it work? Argo is Atalanta’s commercially released cybersecurity product that uses a methodology called “software understanding,” combining advanced formal mathematics with artificial intelligence to conduct comprehensive vulnerability analysis of complex software systems — producing mathematically verifiable assessments of a system’s resilience against cyberattacks.
How was Atalanta’s technology used after the 2022 Russian hacking attack on Viasat? Following Russia’s February 2022 cyberattack that disabled thousands of Viasat satellite modems across Ukraine and Europe, Atalanta worked with Viasat over approximately one year to harden the satellite communications network against future attacks, using the technology now commercialised in Argo to produce a mathematically backed assessment of the network’s improved resilience.
What makes Argo different from existing cybersecurity tools on the market? Argo is the first commercially available system capable of analysing software and Internet-connected systems for vulnerabilities using formal mathematical methods combined with AI, providing a more comprehensive and verifiable form of security assessment than pattern-matching tools, penetration testing services, or conventional AI-powered threat detection platforms.
Has the U.S. government recognised Atalanta’s technology? The U.S. Department of Energy selected Atalanta’s technology for its Genesis Mission to develop autonomous nuclear reactors. The Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, stated at a Darpa software conference that the mathematics underpinning Atalanta’s approach should become the Department of Defense’s gold standard for cybersecurity. Darpa has invested over US$2 billion in the formal methods field that underpins this technology.
What other threats is this technology designed to address beyond Russian cyberattacks? Multiple U.S. government agencies have warned in 2026 that Iranian state-sponsored hackers are actively targeting critical infrastructure including water and wastewater systems. Atalanta’s software understanding approach is designed to harden any software-dependent critical system against sophisticated cyberattacks regardless of their origin.
Will AI-assisted formal methods tools like Argo eventually become standard across the industry? Greg Shannon, chief cybersecurity scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, assessed that within one to two decades, formal-methods-based cybersecurity verification tools will become a standard part of the development toolkit for any system of consequence — a trajectory consistent with the over US$2 billion Darpa has invested in this field over the past two decades.
A New Standard for Satellite and Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Takes Shape
The release of Argo marks a concrete commercial step in the transition from reactive to mathematically verifiable cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. The 2022 Russian cyberattack on Viasat’s satellite communication system demonstrated in operational terms what researchers had long argued: that conventional defence tools are insufficient against state-level adversaries targeting software-dependent systems. Atalanta’s AI-assisted tool addresses that problem not by patching known weaknesses, but by providing operators with a rigorous, mathematics-backed understanding of their systems’ resilience — an approach that U.S. government scientists and senior Pentagon officials have identified as the direction the entire field must take.
As Iranian cyber threats to water infrastructure and other critical systems continue to escalate in 2026, the demand for tools capable of providing verifiable security assurance — rather than probabilistic defence — is expected to grow substantially across both the private sector and government agencies.
For more information on Atalanta’s Argo cybersecurity tool and software understanding capabilities, readers may contact Atalanta directly through the company’s official channels. Further reporting on related cybersecurity developments can be found at thestar.com.my.