If anything, this year proved that the space race is back on. With a renewed government and commercial interest in the development of space technologies, a lot of attention (and money) is being directed toward space infrastructure and exploration. This trend has swept both the Western and Eastern worlds, including Russia, India, and the Middle East, and is only continuing to ramp up as global tensions continue to rise.

An equal and opposite tide is also rising in the sea of threats to critical space infrastructure. This year has seen a significant increase in space security news headlines, with much of the activity being perpetrated by nation-states and state-affiliated criminal groups. A number of countries, including Australia, have also made moves to recognise space technology as critical infrastructure, extending the critical infrastructure legal protections and requirements to space systems.

This makes space security a topic worth following and raising awareness of, which is why I’ve curated these top 10 space security news items of 2022:

1. Cyber attack against Viasat‘s KA-SAT ground infrastructure, which caused broadband outages across Europe.
2. Russian jamming of Starlink satellite internet in Ukraine, which SpaceX notably successfully disarmed with a rapid custom code fix. This also prompted several government discussions around military agility and space resilience.
3. Ten countries committed to banning destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons testing, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, South Korea, France, Australia, and Switzerland.
4. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observatory telescopes in Chile suspended all astronomical observation operations after a cyber attack against their critical operational servers, recovering after 48 days offline.
5. Chinese military announced that Starlink is a threat to China’s national security and called for a “hard kill” weapon to be developed.
6. Russian military group, Fancy Bear, was discovered inside a US satellite communications network months after signs of initial intrusion. The SATCOM network was reported to service critical infrastructure operators in the region.
7. Continued GPS jamming and spoofing attacks across the globe, with a notable mention of the city-wide GPS disruptions across major Russian cities, supposedly as a Ukrainian counter-attack against Russian military drones. Also, the jamming device planted at a Chinese spaceport just prior to launch.
8. Researchers identified a security flaw in the Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) networking protocol used in spacecraft, that could cause critical equipment to malfunction. The ‘PCSpooF’ (PCF) exploit was demonstrated in a simulation that caused the NASA Artemis I Orion spacecraft to fail to dock.
9. NASA conducted its first test of a planetary defence system, called the Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART), which successfully altered the orbit of an asteroid. This project aims to increase the security of Earth from space-based threats and is planned to continue to target bigger asteroids in future.
10. More research highlights, with the demonstration of a cyber supply chain exploit that uses a $25 Modchip to open an unfixable backdoor into a Starlink satellite, permitting the execution of arbitrary code.

Suffice to say, it was certainly a big year for space security.

Although there are many lessons that can be drawn from the events of 2022, the key takeaway is that space is becoming an increasingly attractive target; especially to cyber attackers. The continued rising global tensions, rapid technological advancements, and increasing accessibility to powerful hacking tools will undoubtedly only continue to raise the threat levels in the new year.

Suffering a security incident is considered unavoidable these days, but with a sound and appropriately funded security risk management program, most organisations should be able to put effective measures to build resilience into their systems (including the OT environment!) and mitigate the impacts of any foreseeable incident.

It is highly advisable to seek expert guidance when implementing any risk program on your critical systems. It is a complex undertaking and there are currently no industry-standard cybersecurity frameworks to help implement safe risk mitigation techniques in space systems. Anchoram has experts in this domain who can assist with your security program if you are in need of a hand, we’re just an email away.