The US military will hold a competition this August at the renowned DEFCON hacker convention in which rival teams of white-hat hackers will, for the first time ever, attempt to breach and seize control of computer systems on a satellite really in orbit.
Steve Colenzo, Technology Transfer Lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate in Rome, New York, and one of the contest’s organizers, remarked that after four years, “this year, we are in space for real.”
Hack-A-Sat Challenge on Orbiting US Satellites
In response to the infamous cyberattack on the Viasat KA-SAT European satellite network last year, the Hack-A-Sat 4 capture-the-flag competition was launched.
Just as Russian troops crossed the border, Russian military hackers attempted to decapitate Ukrainian command and control of its armed forces by shutting down the network.
The strike was absolutely successful technically, despite conflicting reports regarding its effect on the fighting.
Every ground user terminal that was active at the moment on the KA-SAT automatically turned off and could not be powered back on.
This, along with the incident’s unintended consequences, such as the disruption of German wind farms, highlighted both the importance of space-based global communications networks to the global economy and its susceptibility to hacking.
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Illuminating the Cyber Threat to Space-Based Capabilities through Hack-A-Sat Contest
The annual Hack-A-Sat competition, which tries to expose the cyber danger faced by space-based capabilities, was also shown to be valuable.
Agricultural, mining, financial, and insurance sectors all rely on space-based skills, he claimed. The most well-known is GPS, which is delivered by a network of US military satellites.
In addition to giving directions to inexperienced drivers, GPS and its equivalents in China, Europe, Japan, and Russia also manage automated farm machinery and offer timing and location data for online financial transactions that are secure.
Insurance and other businesses are using other space-based technologies like earth observation satellites, which can indicate damage from extreme weather occurrences, more and more.
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