With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypted.
A fascinating read, thanks for sharing :-)
Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data
Submitted 5 months ago by schizoidman@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
obinice@lemmy.world 5 months ago
stoy@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I remember reading that drug cartells in South America are using disused military communications satellites.
These satellites simply takes a signal recieved on one band and rebroadcast it on another band over a wide area, so as long as the satellite can pick up your signal you can basically talk to an entire continent at once, all while remaining anonymous.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
There must be some additional steps. Otherwise those satellites would be overloaded with hooligans.
FE80@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Someone tell me how to join team “satellite hooligan”.
Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Well the biggest steps I’m going to assume are having a satellite dish, knowing where to point it, knowing what to send, then hope that someone is listening. Much easier for a hooligan to throw a rock at someone or find a can of spray paint
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Nope, lol. These suckers are fucking ancient. There isn’t any processing, you can’t overload something that isn’t actually reading the data or using a protocol.
obinice@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s fuckin rad, I love satellites! So eerie and mysterious ~
treadful@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
“Generally, our users choose the encryption that they apply to their communications to suit their specific application or need,” says a spokesperson for SES, the parent company of Intelsat. “For SES’s inflight customers, for example, SES provides a public Wi-Fi hot spot connection similar to the public internet available at a coffee shop or hotel. On such public networks, user traffic would be encrypted when accessing a website via HTTPS/TLS or communicating using a virtual private network.”
Can’t decide the side of the fence I am on for this. Of course the vast majority of Internet traffic across the world is unencrypted. Anyone could be on the line between me and this Lemmy instance, just as they could if there was a satellite between us. However, you’re also broadcasting it to like 25% of the globe and not even making any kind of physical infrastructure efforts.
Quest can’t entirely guarantee nobody will snoop a fiber line, but they do bury them.
Arkthos@pawb.social 5 months ago
Typically satellites have beams they turn on and off to service different areas, with one beam pointing towards the RAN that receives the data rather than just repeating a broadcast out to everywhere the satellite can theoretically reach. For mobile telecom backhaul via satellite it is standardized that the data should be encrypted for untrusted transport links so this seems to me like an issue of not following specs.
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 5 months ago
vast majority of Internet traffic across the world is unencrypted.
In 2023 between 80% and 95% of web traffic was encryted. Unencrypted web traffic is getting pretty rare.
treadful@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I should’ve been more clear, I didn’t mean the data, but at the protocol level it’s all open.
Same with the Internet traffic through these satellites.
JamonBear@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Original pdf paper: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites