Using a commercially available satellite dish, a team of researchers at two US universities confirmed the lack of security protecting the at-times sensitive content being broadcast from satellites. The teams at the University of Maryland and UC San Diego said that they easily tapped into geostationary satellite transponders sending private consumer data, internal corporate communications, voice and SMS transmissions from mobile phones and - perhaps most disturbing - military transmissions that were particularly sensitive.

The research teams released their findings on the 13th of October and the contents were carried by the website Wired. They said that the satellites’ extreme vulnerability was discovered with the use of nothing more than off-the-shelf radio equipment that is widely available on the market.

The teams concluded that at least half of the geostationary satellites carrying such data do not have effective encryption in place, leaving the contents of the transmissions accessible to hackers and others with the ability to monitor them.

According to the report, the researchers alerted many of the satellite operators after the discoveries were made. They wrote, in their report: [quote] “In several cases, the responsible party told us that they had deployed a remedy.” [Endquote] They included WalMart, T-Mobile and KPU. They note that remediation was still going on for other affected parties and, as such, the team did not identify them in the report. In the meantime, they said, end users are able to encrypt their network traffic via a Virtual Private Network and, on mobile devices, the use of end-to-end encrypted apps.