Hacking a satellite to send out a broadcast sounds like a plan ripped from a spy thriller, but it’s actually something you can do in your spare time.
Hacking a satellite and using it to send out a nationwide broadcast sounds like a plan ripped straight from a spy thriller — but it’s actually something you can do in your spare time. You may also think the equipment involved is locked in a vault beneath the Pentagon, but you only need around $300 and access to an uplink station. So for less than the price of a Meta Quest 2, you can hijack one of the many disused satellites whizzing around the rock we live on and relay your demands to the world’s governments.
During this year’s annual DefCon hacker convention, Karl Koscher, a member of the white hat hacking group ShadyTel, recently did just that. Koscher managed to hack into a disused Canadian broadcast satellite and used it to broadcast a variety of content. The broadcast included talks from last year’s ToorCon, which is a San Diego-based hacking conference, and a variety of hacking-themed movies like « WarGames. » If he wanted, Koscher could also broadcast his voice over the satellite by tying it to a phone conference bridge.
Speaking to Motherboard, the hacker explained what motivated him to make the broadcast. Koscher said: « What do you do with a satellite? What does a hacker do with a satellite? You have some fun with it. We had an opportunity to use a satellite that was being decommissioned. We also had the ability to put our own content on there. » Koscher took the legal route to both performing the hack and transmitting the broadcast. With the right know-how and equipment, the whole thing seems quite straightforward and involves exploiting glaring security flaws in the satellite themselves. These security issues exist despite the fact the hackers targeting satellites aren’t always ethical.
Hacking is actually a broad topic. Despite what stock photos of people hunched over in hoodies may have you believe, there is actually a very large ethical hacking community. Some ethical hackers probe for holes in software in an attempt to find exploits and inform a developer about them before one of the bad guys does. Some of them do it for fun, either in private, in small groups, or at gatherings known as hackathons. Others make a living that way.
