The findings strongly imply that virtually anyone, equipped with modest technical knowledge and a small investment, could replicate this setup in almost any part of the world and feasibly capture a comparable trove of sensitive, unencrypted data. What makes this revelation particularly striking is the simplicity and affordability of the equipment the researchers relied upon; they deliberately limited themselves to commercially available, off‑the‑shelf components—specifically, a satellite dish costing approximately $185, a $140 roof mount paired with a $195 motor for precise directional control, and a tuner card priced around $230. The entire configuration therefore amounted to less than $800, a sum that places such a project well within the financial reach of hobbyists, independent researchers, or even curious amateurs seeking to explore the vulnerability of satellite communications.
Matt Blaze, a renowned computer scientist and cryptographer at Georgetown University who also teaches at Georgetown Law, emphasized the significance of this accessibility. According to him, the resources employed were not those of a sophisticated intelligence agency or an organization with vast funding, but rather those of the average consumer—a person with a DirecTV subscription could theoretically assemble an equivalent system. He observed that the barrier to entry for carrying out an attack or test of this nature is astonishingly low. Blaze went so far as to predict that within a matter of weeks, it is likely that numerous individuals—potentially hundreds or even thousands, many operating without public disclosure of their intentions—will attempt to replicate the experiment, training their newly installed dishes toward orbit to discover what unprotected signals might still be circulating freely.
Despite this seemingly wide‑open opportunity, the researchers noted that the most substantial constraint for imitators may not be financial but temporal and technical. Their own success depended on spending hundreds of hours manually fine‑tuning their satellite’s orientation and alignment on a rooftop, a meticulous process that demanded both patience and technical precision. Furthermore, interpreting the captured data required an advanced understanding of obscure, often poorly documented communication protocols. Yet even this layer of difficulty may soon be reduced, as the researchers plan to release an open‑source software toolkit—aptly named *Don’t Look Up*—on GitHub. This tool will allow others to parse and analyze satellite transmissions more efficiently, lowering the technical skill threshold required to engage in similar research.
The team acknowledged a troubling duality in their work: while the demonstration may empower individuals with less altruistic motives to harvest private or classified data from orbit, it also serves a critical ethical function. By exposing the fragility of existing satellite communication systems, they hope to motivate the entities responsible for such data—whether corporations, government agencies, or service providers—to implement thorough encryption safeguards. One of the researchers, Schulman, articulated their philosophy succinctly: as long as their efforts contribute to identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities, reinforcing the security landscape rather than exploiting it, they believe their work remains firmly on the side of the public good.
The researchers harbor little doubt that major intelligence organizations, leveraging far more powerful and sophisticated receiver hardware, have been engaging in similar surveillance of unencrypted satellite transmissions for many years. They reference prior governmental awareness of the issue, noting that in 2022, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) itself issued a security advisory explicitly warning of the dangers posed by the absence of encryption in satellite communications. From this perspective, it would be entirely reasonable to assume that not only the NSA but also other intelligence services—spanning the globe from Russia to China and beyond—have deployed networks of satellite dishes strategically positioned worldwide to intercept precisely this kind of inadequately protected data. The NSA, for its part, declined to offer comment when contacted by *WIRED* regarding these findings.
In a moment of wry humor, Nadia Heninger, a cryptography professor at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the lead researchers on the study, quipped that if such intelligence agencies were not already conducting this form of data interception, one would justifiably question the allocation of tax dollars supporting their operations. Heninger drew an explicit comparison between her team’s discovery and the revelations that emerged from Edward Snowden’s disclosures a decade earlier—leaks that exposed the vast scale on which the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ clandestinely tapped into global telecommunications and internet infrastructure. Those disclosures reshaped the global discussion around data privacy, surveillance, and encryption, revealing how easily major intelligence bodies could appropriate personal communications for state analysis.
According to Heninger, the prevailing perception of digital threats had long been rooted in the idea that governments were secretly intercepting fiber‑optic cables under the seas or coercing telecommunication companies into providing backend access to private data. The logical defense was comprehensive encryption across networks to guard against such tightly controlled points of interception. Yet, she explained, what is now being uncovered is equally alarming: the same categories of deeply personal or strategically valuable data are not merely confined within those cables—they are being broadcast, openly and continuously, across the skies to a substantial portion of the planet. This discovery profoundly changes the modern understanding of privacy and security, revealing that the vulnerabilities once attributed solely to internet infrastructure now extend far beyond terrestrial networks and into the very fabric of global satellite communication.
Sourse: https://www.wired.com/story/satellites-are-leaking-the-worlds-secrets-calls-texts-military-and-corporate-data/
