Weather satellite may have been hacked by Chinese


Forget about celebrity phone hacking, Bloomberg and TPM are both reporting on a far more disturbing possibility: the world’s first sat hack. What NASA calls “suspicious” events reportedly appear in a draft prepared for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission:

The alleged interference with the Terra AM-1 satellite took place twice, for two minutes in June 2008 and nine minutes in October of that year, Bloomberg attributes to the draft report. The report also indicates a Landsat-7 Earth-observation satellite was hacked for 12 or more minutes in October 2007 and July 2008, Bloomberg reports.

Hacking weather satellites in and of itself is probably not cause for concern. But the technology for doing it doesn’t have to stop there. Any device with a wireless interface could fall prey to the same methods. That could mean GPS guided weapons and drone aircraft like the Reaper shown above are vulnerable to long distance hijack by enemy black-hats. And that’s something the military should be very concerned about.

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