Only $25 to crack the Starlink satellite terminal?

Only $25 to crack the Starlink satellite terminal?

At the recent Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas, a Belgian researcher from Lennert Wouters demonstrated live and successfully cracked one of SpaceX’s Starlink user terminals.

Starlink is a satellite Internet business launched by Elon Musk’s private aerospace company SpaceX, which mainly provides network services for remote areas and areas that cannot be covered by network signals. At present, the business has grown to more than 3,000 satellites.

During the demonstration, Wouters used a cracking device with a total cost of only $25 to successfully hack into Starlink’s satellite dish terminal and gain access to the system.

“Our attack could render Starlink’s user terminals unusable and allow us to execute arbitrary code,” Wouters wrote.

Before presenting his findings at the Las Vegas conference, Wouter had warned SpaceX about vulnerabilities in its user terminals.

Starlink has updated the system, but the researchers replied that the only reliable way to avoid such attacks is to create a new version of the main chip.