Black Hat Four countries have now tested anti-satellite missiles (the US, China, Russia, and India), but it's much easier and cheaper just to hack them.
In a briefing at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Milenko Starcik and Andrzej Olchawa from German biz VisionSpace Technologies demonstrated how easy it is by exploiting software vulnerabilities in the software used in the satellites themselves, as well as the ground stations that control them.
"I used to work at the European Space Agency on ground station IT and got sick of telling them what was wrong and not having them fix it," Olchawa told The Register, "So I decided to go into business to do it myself." //
"We found actual vulnerabilities which allow you to crash the entire onboard software with an unauthenticated telephone," claimed Starcik.
"So basically, you send a packet to the spacecraft, and the entire software crashes and reboots, which then actually causes the spacecraft, if it's not properly configured, to reset all its keys. And then you have zero keys on the spacecraft that you can use from that stage on."
