April 26, 2023

At the CYSAT conference in Paris, cybersecurity specialists from Thales demonstrated the world’s first ethical hacking demonstration on a satellite by simulating the takeover of an ESA nanosatellite. The exercise was held to demonstrate the potential consequences of a cyberattack on civilian space systems.

The ESA’s OPS-SAT was the primary target of Thales specialists’ ethical hacking scenario. This satellite, which was launched in December 2019, has a ten-times more powerful experimental computer than any previous ESA spacecraft.

Thales’ hackers successfully acquired control of the satellite’s application environment and uncovered flaws that allowed them to put malicious code into the system, jeopardizing the data broadcast to Earth. Furthermore, in order to avoid discovery by the ESA, the hackers altered the photos captured by the satellite’s camera, choosing obscuring particular geographic areas in the satellite’s imagery.

Thales’ Vice President of Cyber Solutions, Pierre-Yves Jolivet, revealed that the ethical hacking simulation was carried out to improve the cybersecurity of satellites and space projects, spanning both terrestrial segments and orbital systems. Moreover, during the demonstration, ESA had continuous access to the satellite’s systems, allowing them to resume normal operations following the demonstration.

The sources for this piece include an article in TheRecord.