The motif associated with taking control of satellites belonging to space agencies or companies is often found in sensational films. Having full control over such a vehicle, the hacker is theoretically able to use it for his own purposes or destroy it by deorbiting (the satellite will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere). The European Space Agency (ESA) decided to check whether this is possible in practice.
Security specialists seized a satellite in Earth orbit
During the CYSAT 2023 conference in Paris, a competition was organized to break the security and hack into ESA’s OPS-SAT satellite (a CubeSat used for software experiments). to the cybersecurity team of the French company Thales, which not only found and exploited vulnerabilities in OPS-SAT for the attack, but also took control of all elements of the satellite. Specialists got into the vehicle’s on-board computer, sent it malicious software, and as a result took control of the satellite’s positioning and position control systems and the on-board camera.
What’s more, they were also able to influence the data that the satellite sends to ESA, e.g. modify images sent from space or mask certain areas of the Earth so that they are invisible to scientists from the space agency. Moreover, cybersecurity specialists were able to do it in such a way that ESA would not detect that hackers had access to the OPS-SAT on-board computer. The burglars also had the ability to control the position of the vehicle, but did not perform any maneuvers for security reasons. ESA retained partial control of its satellite during the test, and it was returned to normal operation after its completion.
This is, of course, only an experiment carried out in controlled conditions, but it shows how important it is today to properly secure access to satellites in earth orbit. In a situation where the control over the vehicle is taken over by, for example, enemy hackers, they will be able to, for example, take over and falsify the collected data, or deorbit the vehicle, which means its destruction (in the case of larger devices, even hitting the Earth). According to a CIA report published some time ago, China is already developing methods to hack foreign satellites. They were also linked to attacks on US surveillance satellites in the past.
Source: Gazeta
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