Space Cyber Attacks: The Undetected Threat to Satellites #shorts

The next couple of slides, I want to introduce you a bit to why cyber is a very interesting topic in space system security. Um because it has its unique properties. Um And then come of course the the cyber attacks where you have very limited attribution. You can of course try to work with some IP addresses, but that's like they will have an infrastructure that you cannot attribute to them or that will look like someone else. Um And for an operator of a spacecraft it's very difficult to detect it immediately and to to do countermeasures. But for the attacker it has a lot of benefits because it they can deny it. Like an attacker is rarely blind in when they

are performing a cyber attack. So um satellite systems are pretty difficult to reach. So once you have launched a satellite, it's very difficult to go there and fix something. So you will often have like some backdoors, some high priority commands to can send some something something to do in case something goes wrong. Even if there is like a even if the communication is encrypted, there will likely be a way to turn off the encryption. Just because otherwise you cannot control the spacecraft. Um So this are like hard tradeoffs, but often in my opinion the the wrong decision is taken. Um And my last point is what I will elaborate a bit more is missing security

culture. So there is a huge like I would say hacking culture in terms of keeping things operational. So if something fails, if there is on spacecraft you often have things failing you didn't expect to fail. And they're kind of built to handle this kind of things and the operators will find a way around to still keep the thing going. Um But unfortunately this does not translate to security. So this translate to safety of the thing, but not to the security of the thing. I think many people underestimate how much you can do if you have time and resources. This seems to be like a general misunderstanding in the at least my perspective in the space

industry is that many people don't understand what a proficient attacker can do.