Aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman is working with SpaceX, the space venture of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, on a classified spy satellite project already capturing high-resolution imagery of the Earth, according to people familiar with the program.
A study into the feasibility of hacking low-Earth orbit satellites has revealed that it's worryingly easy to do.
In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Johannes Willbold, a PhD student at Germany's Ruhr University Bochum, explained he had been investigating the security of satellites. He studied three types of orbital machinery and found that many were utterly defenseless against remote takeover because they lack the most basic security systems.