Satellites are broadcasting military secrets leaving experts alarmed
It turns out that pointing a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish can lead you to a ‘shockingly’ large amount of unencrypted personal, corporate, and government data as the researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland were surprised to discover. They say that the data can be ‘passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware.’ But what exactly did they find? (Picture: Getty)
The sky is full of junk. Space junk in particular. It is thought that there are over 12,000 satellites currently active above us, with thousands more left to decay in orbit. But the team found that around half of geostationary satellite signals, some which carry sensitive consumer, corporate, and government communications, have been left open to eavesdropping. And this find would be worrying for many of those in the cybersecurity industry, telecom firms, and inside military and intelligence agencies worldwide (Picture: Getty)
So what did the team do?
For three years, the researchers developed and used an $800 (around £600) satellite receiver system on the roof of a university building in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. The aim was to pick up the communications of geosynchronous satellites from a patch of space that was visible from their Southern California point. But after pointing their dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the data, they gathered a large collection of private data (Picture: Getty)
This includes samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities (Picture: Getty)
The team uncovered a haul of unencrypted US and Mexican governmental traffic, including communications and network info from US military ships, surveillance operation data, and Mexican military and police chatter. There was so much data revealed regarding the US military ships that researchers could piece together the names of individual vessels which allowed them to run full background checks (Picture: Getty)
The team said they were only able to access around 15% of the satellites in operation, meaning there’s likely much more unencrypted data being beamed down. However, the researchers did warn the groups before publishing their study and confirmed that both T-Mobile and Walmart have since encrypted their satellite data. But why were the satellites not encrypted in the first place? The researchers wrote: ‘There are direct costs to enabling encryption. Some users may forgo encryption intentionally; others may be unaware these links are unencrypted or underestimate the risk and ease of eavesdropping attacks’ (Picture: Getty)
Speaking to WIRED – who broke the story – Dr Aaron Schulman, a UCSD professor who co-led the research said: ‘It just completely shocked us. There are some really critical pieces of our infrastructure relying on this satellite ecosystem, and our suspicion was that it would all be encrypted. And just time and time again, every time we found something new, it wasn’t.’ He added: ‘They assumed that no one was ever going to check and scan all these satellites and see what was out there. That was their method of security. They just really didn’t think anyone would look up.’ The team’s findings will be presented at a Taiwan Association for Computing Machinery conference under the paper ‘Don’t Look Up’ (Picture: Getty) Add Metro as a Preferred Source on Google Add as preferred source
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