Sunday, May 24, 2020

Cheap TV Equipment Eavesdrops on Sensitive Satellite

An Oxford University-based security researcher says he used £270 ($300) of home television equipment to capture terabytes of real-world satellite traffic — including sensitive data from “some of the world’s largest organisations.”

James Pavur, a Rhodes Scholar and DPhil student at Oxford, will detail the attack in a session at the Black Hat security conference in early August...

It appears to boil down in large part to the absence of encryption-in-transit for satellite-based broadband communications.

It also reveals how some of the eavesdropping was conducted using a “75 cm, flat-panel satellite receiver dish and a TBS-6983 DVB-S receiver… configured to receive Ku-band transmissions between 10,700 MHz and 12,750 MHz. A set of 14 geostationary satellites were selected [and from them] over 350 transponders were identified using existing “Blind Scan” tools. more