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.
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.
There must be some additional steps. Otherwise those satellites would be overloaded by hooligans.
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.
They still use energy, no? To relay signals on another frequency. That should come from somewhere, and also the more different signals, the more noise. And without their input frequency being regulated, there must be lots of noise.
Someone tell me how to join team “satellite hooligan”.
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
That’s fuckin rad, I love satellites! So eerie and mysterious ~
Original pdf paper: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites
“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.
A fascinating read, thanks for sharing :-)
