Black Hat : Satellite hacking for fun isn’t cheap

From the ‘information is just flying through the air‘ files:

WASHINGTON — One of the sessions I was really looking forward to ahead of the Black Hat DC event this year was Adam Laurie’s session titled – Satellite Hacking for Fun and Profit.

It’s a session that didn’t disappoint, Laurie is always entertaining, but it also revealed how much effort is actually required to try and get at satellite signals.

First off, Laurie prefaced his talk by noting that he wasn’t going to talk about hacking the actual satellite in space itself.

“I’m playing it safe and just looking at what is coming down,” Laurie told the Black Hat audience.

Instead what Laurie focused his talk on was something he called ‘Feed Hunting’ – that is looking for satellite feeds that are not supposed to be found. Laurie claimed that he has been doing satellite feed hunting for years – at least as far back as the untimely demise of the late Princess Diana in 1997. Laurie claimed that he was able to find a non-public feed from a TV broadcaster that had left their transponder on in a Paris hotel room.

Fast forward a dozen years and Laurie commented that the technology to identify satellite feeds has progressed dramatically. Among the reasons why he satellite feed hunting has gotten easier is an open source based satellite received called the dreambox.