Don’t look up, or How to intercept satellite data

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Researchers have discovered that 50% of data transmitted via satellites is unencrypted. This includes your mobile calls and texts, along with banking, military, government, and other sensitive information. How did this happen, and what can we do about it?
 
The year is 2024. A team of scientists from both the University of California San Diego and the University of Maryland, College Park, discovers an unimaginable danger looming over the world — its source hiding in space. They start sounding the alarm, but most people simply ignore them…

No, this isn’t the plot of the Netflix hit movie Don’t Look Up. This is the sudden reality in which we find ourselves following the publication of a study confirming that corporate VoIP conversations, military operation data, Mexican police records, private text messages and calls from mobile subscribers in both the U.S. and Mexico, and dozens of other types of confidential data are being broadcast unencrypted via satellites for thousands of miles. And to intercept it, all you need is equipment costing less than US$800: a simple satellite-TV receiver kit.

Today, we explore what might have caused this negligence, if it’s truly as easy to extract the data from the stream as described in a Wired article, why some data operators ignored the study and took no action, and, finally, what we can do to ensure our own data doesn’t end up on these vulnerable channels.

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