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Overview First, I learned a lot of my information from a combination of my amateur radio experience and an awesome talk I sat in at DEFCON 18. The majority of satellite systems are simple repeaters. The signal that comes in on a transponder is cleaned, amplified, and retransmitted. If you know the location and input frequency, and you pump more effective ...

I used to be a Command Controller (CC) at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) (http://lasp.colorado.edu/). I was one of the people who would sit in front of the console during the times when spacecraft were visible to the ground stations. I would read/record telemetry to ensure spacecraft health and often send up new commands that would ...

The Internet at large is designed to resist nuclear blasts. At least, it was a design goal of its immediate predecessor, ARPANET. There is no secret: to survive loss of components, you must have redundancy. In the context of nuclear blasts, this means that there must exist several paths for data between any two machines, and the paths should be as ...

Apparently, NASA is taking communication security very seriously (and I would, too, if I had 2G$+ toys to manage !). I think they've done so for a long time, because in the early times of space exploration (in the 1960s) they feared malicious interference from their arch-enemies, the Soviets. (I do not have a reference handy, but my brain cells tell me that ...

What would be required to hack a satellite (in general terms, any hack really)? When it comes to satellites, the word general does not apply. Almost every satellite, with very few exceptions is custom. Even the currently orbitng GPS satellites are not all the same: there are GPS IIA, GPS IIR, GPS IIR-M, and GPS IIF. I would venture that even satellites ...

In lieu of waxing elequent in a topic that I am only briefly versed, I will defer my response to a DEFCON talk I saw last year that will do at least three things: Blow your mind Expose vulnerabilities in Sats Enlighten your knowledge on the subject in painstaking detail (see item one) Here is the archived talk with video. This is a very nice guy (Matt ...

In addition to the low-cost solutions presented in other answers, which rely on beaming signals at the satellites, there's the (significantly, like many orders of magnitude) more expensive technique borrowed from Ian Fleming's Moonraker of going up there and stealing the thing. You don't even really need to get it back, just pointing it in the wrong ...

First, APT does not refer to exploits, rootkits etc., but to the threat actors and the organisation behind them. That said, bios and firmware attacks have been around for a while. The only change here is the same one any class of attacks goes through: they have become commoditised. This doesn't change the approach of find, patch etc., but it does ...

There's a broad spectrum of methods that could be used to monitor your communication. External Monitoring ("Lawful Intercept") Your attacker could be monitoring your communication upstream. This could be because they're working with your ISP, or they're sniffing your home network (wired or wireless). You said that your attacker knows things you typed... ...

While I dont know how most critical infrastructure is defended against EMP threats I do know of many instances of critical infrastructure offer no protection to these kinds of threats. This does however not mean that there does not exist protection. Take for example Kelvedon Hatch nuclear bunker. Some of its features, and which should be considered in any ...

In addition to the other excellent answers here -- You asked about some of the threats that one must defend against. One possible risk is the possibility that the launch vehicle or spacecraft could be hijacked and retargeted to de-orbit and come back to Earth, hitting some designated location on Earth -- in effect, turning the spacecraft into a ...

First, of all, I'm not expert on hacking satellites, I don't know how to turn GPS repeater into Death Star. What I find interesting is space exploration, travelling into space and so... Everything I'll write here is just something I read somewhere and it's all hypothetical. Satelitte hacking (yeah, I know it's not quite the same as hijacking it) is ...

As far as travel precautions, the EFF has these recommendations for travelling to the US: Carry as little data as possible over the border. Keep a backup of your data elsewhere. Encrypt the data on your device. Store the information you need somewhere else, then download it when you reach your destination. Protect the data on your devices with passwords. ...

Go to, for example, the GCHQ website. Read what they say - they are the largest computing centre in Europe; they employ very many mathematicians and computer people; they are responsible for monitoring communications "from DC to light". With that information you can invent various conspiracy theories about what they are capable of. Mix in information from ...

Okay - there are definitely two important points to remember here: Some governments do have the ability to target a particular individual and tap into everything they do, but They just don't have the resources to do this unless you are an astonishingly valuable target/criminal/spy The technology is all simple stuff, but really, your government don't care ...

First, awesome use of the nuclear-bomb tag. Second, EMP. Electro-magnetic pulse is mostly mitigated by sending it to ground. Place routers/firewalls in a faraday cage (Imagine a room that has copper screen on all sides of it). Ground the Faraday cage (connect the copper mesh to multiple 6' copper rods that are pounded into the ground). Make it level ...

The U.S. government for many years has had a program called TEMPEST. Originally it was a set of specifications for devices and structures intended to minimize the chance of an outside evil-doer picking up emissions from devices processing sensitive data. Over the years it has extended to EMP protection. This is logical since those measures that keep ...

I'm going to assume, for the purposes of winning the bounty, that you aren't crazy, or paranoid, or schizo, or whatever. Here's the thing about surveillance... If you KNOW its happening to you, but you can't figure out how it's being done, then you likely never will figure it out (or you're bonzo). At some point, you will have to resign yourself to the ...

Have you read about the Stuxnet virus? One place to begin reading about it is http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1 Then you can extrapolate the history to your question: yes, if you don't have the source code and don't analyze it, you can't trust what's being used If you don't check everything that comes ...

You probably have read this news a long time ago: http://news.cnet.com/Satellite-hack-raises-security-questions/2100-1033_3-222516.html Do some research about it and you'll find interesting facts... You can also begin looking at satellites' positions in the sky: http://www.n2yo.com/?s=26038 and verify some information about them. You'll find that some ...

What would be required to hack a satellite (in general terms, any hack really)? Just answering to 'any hack'. It is possible to use a satellite to get a completely anonymous connection to the Internet that is untraceable, because the IP address you are using is the IP address of the satellite. Tutorial here. Note: do not try this, it is totally ...

This post is in draft I'm getting a lot of one-liner answers to a question with 500 bounty, so I figure I'll try and raise the water-mark here for quality answers. Post road-map: Expand on past examples of hacks of satellites, work done Find better information on satellite types, explain their usage, and function, as well as inferring potential risks. ...

I can confirm that removing the batteries before meetings is really done in some organizations. It is at least partially sensible, in that battery management might be handled by a dedicated very small CPU which cannot be switched off otherwise: I have an old Mac laptop -- a G4 iBook -- where such a dedicated unit is called the PMU (Power Management Unit). ...

The article you linked to gives as much information as is publicly known. So I'll just quote from there: Investigators still do not know how hackers initially broke into The Times’s systems. They suspect the hackers used a so-called spear-phishing attack, in which they send e-mails to employees that contain malicious links or attachments. All it takes is ...

Think old-school. Vacuum tubes. Transistors and other semiconductors will likely be damaged by the induced voltages of the EMP, and few consumer or industrial grade chips are hardened against this kind of damage. Look at static electricity damage under a microscope some time and you'll see what happens when only a few hundred volts pass through a chip. ...

Bog standard virus outbreaks have rootkits, backdoors and covert channels. It's hard to tell if anyone is even utilizing them since the encrypted communications to the command and control is mysterious enough, and the depth at which you'd have to research it puts that kind of analysis outside of practical security. Oddly, the IDS didn't pick it up, nor ...

I guess one way to see what's going on on your iphone would be to jailbreak it, run a 24/7 tcpdump (while not using the internet in order to keep the .cap small) output it to a .cap file and have a look at it in wireshark. Quite a bit of work to do, but with the right filters you can surely see if there's something going on. That's obviously one definite ...

Do you know or have any experience with that kind of attack? No. (but I can not be trusted) Can you list more techniques? Many, my favorite is using half of a psychoactive chemical in a food product and half in a hygine beauty product. When a populatious uses enoguh of both types of products... Oh wait that's from Batman. Do you know if the ...

That said, bios and firmware attacks have been around for a while. The only change here is > the same one any class of attacks goes through: they have become commoditised. This doesn't change the approach of find, patch etc., but it does mean that a c>ompromised machine may require cleaning at firmware and hardware level, not just OS. ...