The U.S. Air Drive has introduced the winners of its first-of-its-kind satellite tv for pc hacking contest.
This 12 months’s Hack-A-Sat competitors tasked groups with hacking into an precise satellite tv for pc on orbit. This was the primary 12 months that the competitors tasked groups with hacking an precise stay satellite tv for pc zooming above Earth; earlier years used simulated satellites on the bottom.
The small cubesat, often called Moonlighter, was developed by the Aerospace Company and the U.S. Air Drive Analysis Laboratory and launched on June 5, 2023 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket together with a cargo payload for the Worldwide Area Station.
5 groups competed within the Hack-A-Sat competitors from Aug. 11 to Aug. 14 as a part of the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas. The successful crew this 12 months was “mHACKeroni,” a bunch consisting of members of 5 Italian cyber analysis groups. The primary place prize was $50,000. In second place, successful $30,000, was the Polish cyber analysis crew “Poland Can Into Area.” And in third place, the joint British-American crew “jmp fs:[rcx]” received $20,000.
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On this 12 months’s competitors, groups have been tasked with hacking into Moonlighter as a way to bypass the satellite tv for pc’s restrictions on which targets on the bottom it could possibly observe, command it to take an image of that concentrate on after which obtain that picture to a floor station.
By internet hosting competitions comparable to Hack-A-Sat, the U.S. Air Drive and U.S. Area Drive’s Area Methods Command purpose to establish weaknesses that can be utilized to enhance the safety of satellite tv for pc methods overhead.
“We’re so pleased with the whole Hack-A-Sat effort, and notably the event of Moonlighter as the primary and solely hacking sandbox in area,” Col. Neal Roach of Area Methods Command stated in an announcement. “Hack-A-Sat has raised public consciousness on the significance of area cybersecurity and has helped to strengthen the business, safety and authorities partnership that we have to construct extra resilient area methods that may preserve our nation and our world safe.”
The difficulty of satellite tv for pc cybersecurity has taken heart stage lately. Simply final 12 months, Elon Musk reported that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have skilled frequent cyberattacks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And cyberattacks return a lot additional than that; in 2011, two U.S. authorities satellites have been hacked by suspected Chinese language army teams.
