Hackers Briefly Controlled US Government Satellites

Orome1 writes "Two U.S. satellites have been tampered with by hackers — possibly Chinese ones — in 2007 and 2008, claims a soon-to-be released report by the the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The two satellites, Landsat-7 and Terra AM-1, had been interfered with on four separate occasions, allowing the attackers to be in command of the satellites for two to over twelve minutes each time. Luckily, both of the satellites are used only for observing the Earth's climate and terrain, and the hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way."

Comments

Pardon me, but

[chispito]

the hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way

Can we agree that that hacking into a satellite is, by definition, misuse? That there is no proper use in this scenario?

Just testing ...

[perpenso]

hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way

So they are at an early testing stage. That is not overly reassuring.

Not this time:

[Oswald McWeany]

the hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way

No... they were just trying out a proof-of-concept. Now they know how to take over the satelites though- the Chinese will have us in their grasp if we ever go to war... ... think about it- next time we consider going to war with China- they will take over our satellites and force us to watch Chinese Opera on our TV sets. ... our surrender will be so quick the French will call US surrender monkeys.

Re:Not this time:

[Lumpy]

we steal all the other languages words.

Re:Not this time:

[LastGunslinger]

The French have not won a major war in nearly 300 years in which the United States was not their ally. French-Indian / Seven Years War - lost; Napoleon - kicked major ass and wreaked havoc for years and still lost; Franco-Prussian War - lost; Algeria - lost; Vietnam - lost before the US made the same mistake. We don't even need to mention WWII, the collapse of the Republic, and the whole Vichy collaborationist thing. What's that you say? The French made a major contribution towards the American War of Independence, fought valiantly in WWI, and have been good allies to the US during wars of the past few decades? And none of that really has to to do with the US being their ally any more than the US winning wars has to do with the bit part the other nations play in our coalitions, save perhaps Britain.

Nimbus

[Anonymous Coward]

When GE built Nimbus (an early weather satellite) my grandfather was one of the engineers. He had security clearance high enough that it got him out of the draft and an armed guard was required when he went to the dentist (to shoot him should he start saying the wrong things under the gas). As he put it: "there's no way it's just looking at the clouds".

Re:Nimbus

[chill]

Really? My grandfather essentially told me the same story. He was a radioman specializing in radar in the early 1940s. He, too, had armed escorts to dentist appointments. Nor was he allowed to leave the base during the training period. No visitors, either.

Damn near everything he was doing was classified out the wazoo. Times were different then.

Re:WTF!

[Lumpy]

WTF? it's not hard to start messing with a satellite C&C. IT's not like they are on the internet and the older ones have completely open interfaces.

All it takes is a PC with a sound card, custom software, and some ham radio gear and a nice big antenna array. if you can overwhelm the C&C signal from the main control point you can certainly start messing with it, non GEOSYNC birds typically are only communicated with when needed so it's easy to just contact it and send a command.

Hell if a hacker made a big enough antenna array they can screw with Mars rovers.

A little bit of education in how things you rely on work will turn your WTF! into a DUH!. mostly because most older satellites don't even require a username and password to connect and control it.

Re:Security through Geometry?

[Remus Shepherd]

I work on the Landsat project.

Yes, Landsat 7 is controlled from Sioux Falls. But every downlink station (and we have over a dozen of them, including one in China) has the ability to communicate with the satellite to trigger a download of recorded imagery. I assume that's all the hackers did, which means all they would be able to do is wipe some imagery out of the archive. That's a hair-raising scenario for us but not significant for most people.

Only EROS has the ability to upload flight commands to the satellite. That's not to say that Svalbard couldn't, they just don't have the software and one would hope they don't have the documentation needed to form the command syntax. But if they had those things and a hacker took control of them, they could burn the satellite into the atmosphere or send it careening around in its orbital neighborhood. Chances of it hitting another satellite and breaking into a million disaster-causing pieces are minor but not zero.

This is a scary news story for us. I'm interested in seeing the full report when it's finally released.

Re:Imagery not good enough...

[AliasMarlowe]

You don't think the government satellites don't have that type of imagery yet?

Nope. Do the math, the resolving power dR of an optically perfect instrument of diameter D and focal length L using light of wavelength W at working distance equal to focal length is given by:
dR=1.22 W L/D
So for a really thick pube of diameter 0.1mm, using blue light of wavelength 0.0004mm, the L/D must not exceed 204. For low orbit, L is at least 50 kilometers, which suggests D must be at least 250 meters. The larger spy satellites have imperfect mirrors of only 2 or 3 meters, so good luck with scaling their diameters up by two orders of magnitude (i.e. 4 orders of magnitude in area for a simple scaling).

Google Earth scares the shit out of me b/c I cannot imagine WTF the government has with their technology.

You're probably thinking of the aerial photography by USGS and others. Not satellite imagery. It's good, but more than an order of magnitude away from resolving a pube, however.