Slashdot Mirror
Sri Lankan Terrorists Hack Satellite
SorryTomato writes "The Tamil Tigers Liberation Front a separatist group in Sri Lanka, which has been classified as a terrorist group in 32 countries has moved up from routine sea piracy to a space-based one. They have been accused of illegally using Intelsat satellites to beam radio and television broadcasts internationally. Intelsat says that they will end the transmissions 'within days.' Intelsat has been accused of having business links with Hezbollah before, but claim that they are blameless this time and LTTE was using an empty transponder."
The satellite was configured to retransmit on certain channels, the LTE simply beamed up a signal on a channel that wasn't in use but was configured to retransmit if something was being sent to it.
F@-lun gong hacked SinoSat from Taiwan to broadcast their propaganda program to mainland china.
g +sinosat+hack
To read more:
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&q=falun+gon
No need for covert hacking, most satellites are little more than expensive dumb repeaters in space, anyone with a few thousand dollars can bounce a signal off one without restriction, sometimes without even being noticed for a good length of time, if at all.
:-), it is still vastly quicker to have a human operator run through with a spectrum analyser to figure out what should or should not be there. Back when I was working for the man, the visible part of the clark belt in my section of the sky was filled with satellites having many thousands of transmissions on each polarity in use. Weeding out the pirates is tedious and never ending work for a space based telco.
Given that the best automated methods of scanning and identifying energy spikes is about as good as speech recognition 15 years ago - and don't kid your selves on this point you 3 letter agency drone PHB's
I'm certain Intelsat don't want any non-paid for signals period, though the legalities of pirate transmissions are a bit of a grey area depending on which country you are in. I have seen on many occasions a sweeping CW (carrier wave) running back and forth across what I assume are unwanted transmissions. I'd say there's not really much more Intelsat can do except suck it up and try to identify unknowns a tad faster than they have been doing in the past, and then simply try to disrupt the signal - no guarantee this will work though.
The fine article makes it sound like Intelsat have some sophisticated system that'll let them drop the transmissions with a flick of a few switches - this is an interesting feel good fluff explanation probably more aimed at their investors. What they really mean is that there is sweet FA they can do about it beyond asking nicely for the naughty men to turn off their bad signal, otherwise they'll take their transponder and switch it off for everyone, only for a few minutes though.