| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. And here it is … It's morning on Feb. 24, 2022. Ukraine has just been invaded, but you live halfway around the world. Your neighbor comes over to complain that their internet it out. Suddenly, you also lose connectivity. Could it be the Russians? Unlikely as it might seem, for a number of satellite internet customers of Viasat Inc., that's exactly what happened. In a story in this week's Businessweek, Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson digs into the hack that disabled thousands of broadband users all over Europe. She writes: Across Europe and North Africa, tens of thousands of internet connections in at least 13 countries were going dead. Some of the biggest service disruptions affected providers Bigblu Broadband Plc in the UK and NordNet AB in France, as well as utility systems that monitor thousands of wind turbines in Germany. The most critical affected Ukraine: Several thousand satellite systems that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's government depended on were all down, making it much tougher for the military and intelligence services to coordinate troop and drone movements in the hours after the invasion.
It turns out that satellite hacking is one of the bigger and less understood threats of cyberwarfare. For many years, per Manson, no one worried about someone hacking a satellite because … well, it was so hard to even launch a satellite. But in 1986, a man going by "Captain Midnight" jammed HBO's feeds because he was mad about paying a higher fee. There are number of touch points that could be vulnerable to interference—you've got the orbiting satellite, its transmitted data and the network of dishes on the ground, sending and receiving information.  Illustration: Jordan Speer As complex as satellite technology can be, hacking it turns out to be remarkably easy, as there are very few standards of protection. James Pavur, a cybersecurity researcher who recently went to work for the Pentagon as a digital service expert, once did an experiment to test the systems' vulnerability. Per Manson: As part of his 2019 doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, he intercepted sensitive communications beamed down to ships and Fortune 500 companies, including crew manifests, passport details, and credit card numbers and payments, all with $400 worth of home equipment. "It turns out to be easy," he says. "I just bought some cheap antennas, pointed them at some satellites and found I could clean up the data from the signals, because nothing is encrypted."
So what can we do to stop satellite hacks? And how exactly does a country like Russia get away with disabling internet access around the world? You'll have to read the whole story to learn about how the Viasat hack was uncovered, and what the future holds for these systems. Suffice it to say that there's more than just spy balloons and UFOs in the sky; there's your credit card data, national security intel, Netflix logins and necessary information for Ukrainian soldiers, fighting for their lives on the ground. —Reyhan Harmanci, Bloomberg Businessweek | 
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