Security News > 2020 > August > How did you spend your time at university? Pizza, booze, sleeping? This Oxford student is snooping on satellites

DEF CON FYI, if you didn't already know: readily available satellite TV electronics can be used to sniff and inspect satellite internet traffic.

Customers of satellite broadband ISPs include large enterprises, shipping companies, and communications providers using orbiting birds to relay traffic.

The research effort, said Pavur, began as a summer project to test whether the findings of satellite hackers in the 2000s had withstood the test of time.

Armed with a satellite decoder PCI card and an off-the-shelf satellite telly dish, anyone can tune to the right frequency and eavesdrop on non-encapsulated data, such as plaintext DNS lookups and HTTP connections.

In summary, anyone relying on a satellite internet service needs to step up their encapsulation encryption, because you can't assume your traffic is being protected otherwise.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/07/defcon_satellite_hacking/