Safety researchers have found that as many as half of all geostationary satellites in Earth’s orbit are carrying unencrypted delicate shopper, company, and navy info, making this information vast open to eavesdropping.
The researchers at UC San Diego and the College of Maryland spent $800 on an off-the-shelf satellite tv for pc receiver and pointed it on the sky for 3 years. They discovered reams of unencrypted information beaming to and from area, together with folks’s non-public voice calls and textual content messages, and shopper web site visitors from in-flight Wi-Fi providers.
The unencrypted information additionally included communications between crucial infrastructure techniques, reminiscent of power and water suppliers, and off-shore oil and gasoline platforms, in accordance with Wired, which first printed the researchers’ findings.
The researchers spent the previous 12 months alerting affected organizations to the publicity, together with T-Cell and AT&T’s community in Mexico, which started encrypting their information quickly after to stop future eavesdropping.
However the researchers warn that not everybody has remediated their very own uncovered information, together with some crucial infrastructure suppliers, and that enormous quantities of satellite tv for pc information will likely be uncovered for some years to come back.
