SATCOM terminals under attack in Europe: a plausible analysis
I&#x27;ve investigated network equipment before, my findings were that you shouldn&#x27;t trust any of it and use a standard Linux box whenever possible. The worst was consumer-grade modems&#x2F;routers with low-hanging fruits such as backdoors, &quot;forgotten&quot; telnet servers left enabled, shell command injection in the web UI, etc but even enterprise stuff had its problems (thankfully, at least on enterprise stuff you can disable the web UI and any services you don&#x27;t use, considerably shrinking the attack surface to pretty much just the kernel). And don&#x27;t get me started on mobile network equipment where untrusted data is parsed at the kernel level and the motto is still security by obscurity (and the impossibility to obtain said equipment for the average Joe).<p>What I think happened is that they breached the control infrastructure which gives them access to an &quot;internal&quot; VLAN that the satellite terminals use to communicate with the mothership for firmware updates, configuration changes, etc, and from there were able to attack these as if they were locally connected (or worse - since that network segment is presumed &quot;internal&quot; and may expose services not normally available - think whatever is the TR-069 equivalent for BGAN terminals), either just pushing an incorrect configuration that prevents the terminal from connecting (essentially bricking it until you can get out-of-band access and reconfigure it properly) or obtaining root (via exploit or pushing a specially-crafted firmware update) and overwriting &#x2F;dev&#x2F;mtd* to completely kill the terminal.<p>&quot;Cyberattack on satellite network&quot; sounds so serious but I very much doubt it&#x27;s got anything to do with the satellite part of it. They&#x27;ve done the equivalent of breaching into the management network at a terrestrial, wired ISP and sent garbage configuration over TR-069 to brick the modems. Attacking the satellite layer would require much more effort for essentially the same gain (and if your objective was to get into the satellite layer, why waste that access on breaking everything in a highly-visible way when you&#x27;re better off silently sitting there and using the access to eavesdrop on everything, especially when it&#x27;s used for SCADA traffic of critical systems that&#x27;s itself unencrypted and vulnerable to tampering?).