Satellite Internet open to major security threats

Vulnerabilities are ‘worse than ever’

Ars Technica reports on a briefing at the ‘Black Hat’ security conference, in which an Oxford researcher, James Pavur, revealed the extent to which satellite internet is ‘putting millions of users at risk’, in spite of providers adopting new technologies. The research involved pointing receivers at geostationary satellites and scanning the k-band spectrum to identify internet traffic. Researchers were able to see the contents of HTTP sites a user was browsing, or of any unencrypted emails. The research also identified vulnerabilities to hacking of aircraft using satellite based internet for navigation, through a technique called ‘TCP session hijacking’. The researchers suggested that using a VPN to prevent reading or tampering resulted in increasing latency by 90%, rendering the satellite service barely usable. Read more