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Source: Forbes - Posted by Anthony Pell
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Satellites can bring a digital signal to places where the Internet seems like a miracle: off-the-grid desert solar farms, the Arctic or an aircraft carrier at sea. But in beaming data to and from the world's most remote places, satellite Internet may also offer its signal to a less benign recipient: any digital miscreant within thousands of miles.
In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Arlington, Va., Tuesday, Spanish cybersecurity researcher Leonardo Nve presented a variety of tricks for gaining access to and exploiting satellite Internet connections. Using less than $75 in tools, Nve, a researcher with security firm S21Sec, says that he can intercept Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) signals to get free high-speed Internet. And while that's not a particularly new trick--hackers have long been able to intercept satellite TV or other sky-borne signals--Nve also went a step further, describing how he was able to use satellite signals to anonymize his Internet connection, gain access to private networks and even intercept satellite Internet users' requests for Web pages and replace them with spoofed sites. "What's interesting about this is that it's very, very easy," says Nve. "Anyone can do it: phishers or Chinese hackers … it's like a very big Wi-Fi network that's easy to access."
In a penetration test on a client's network, Nve used a Skystar 2 PCI satellite receiver card, a piece of hardware that can be bought on eBay ( EBAY - news - people ) for $30 or less, along with open source Linux DVB software applications and the network data analysis or "sniffing" tool Wireshark.
Read this full article at Forbes
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