Cyberwar is also being played out in space: this is the message launched by cybersecurity experts, meeting in Paris on Wednesday and Thursday April 7 at the Conference on cybersecurity in space. Two days of debate between space players and cybersecurity players as the war in Ukraine highlights the risks that also weigh on satellites. For the occasion, hackers were invited to demonstrate how satellites, which multiply in space, can be an easy target.
Among them are Aris and Xavier, who identify themselves as hackers, but emphasize that they are not cybercriminals, but ethical hackers.
“Hacking is a state of mind, it’s looking inside things, trying to understand how they work. Studying, finding all the flaws and fixing them before they are used.”
These two cybersecurity specialists won a very special competition organized by the American army. Their objective was to hack into a satellite. “We had to do things that we hadn’t done since our studies, he describes. We had to do math to calculate satellite orbits. We had to be interested in communication protocols, radio links.” “One of the tests, he continues, it was a satellite that is being attacked by ransomware/ransomware. And we, we come behind to try to understand what happened, to find the error that the attacker made in order to be able to recover the files.”
This is obviously a simulation. The European Space Agency, too, has issued a challenge to its pirates: to take control of one of its satellites. Mathieu Bailly is head of the space branch at Sail, a cybersecurity company that organized the competition:
“What better than a hacker to demonstrate that a system is vulnerable? Take control, install ransomware, spy on the images and data collected on board, they can do almost anything!”
Mathieu Baillyat franceinfo
The consequences on the ground can be very concrete: “All the citizens of Europe depend on the services that are provided by satellites, whether for navigation or telecommunications, or for imagery. The United States has declared space as critical infrastructure: we must the same thing in Europe and better protect ourselves.”
The news shines a spotlight on these issues with this attack against the Ka-Sat satellite, on February 24, the day of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a strategic satellite which provides Internet to thousands of customers. , including Ukrainian forces.
“Concretely, explains Thomas Girard, cybersecurity specialist at CS Group. During the Ka-Sat attack, the hackers disabled the modems and therefore the box could no longer connect to the satellite behind. Mechanically, the customer was cut off, especially on Ukrainian territory.” Threats taken seriously as satellite networks multiply, in particular to provide Internet in the least connected regions.