Researchers find a startlingly cheap way to steal your secrets from space

How much private and sensitive data can you get by pointing $600 worth of satellite equipment at the sky?
Quite a bit, it turns out.
Researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of California, San Diego say they were able to intercept sensitive data from the U.S. military, telecommunications firms, major businesses and organizations by passively scanning and collecting unencrypted data from the satellites responsible for beaming that information across the globe.
The satellites they focused on — geostationary satellites — provide modern high-speed communications and services to rural or remote parts of the globe, including television, IP communications, internet and in-flight Wi-Fi capabilities. They also provide backhaul internet services — the links between a core telecom or internet network and its end users — for private networks operating sensitive remote commercial and military equipment.
Using cheap, commercially available equipment, researchers scanned 39 satellites across 25 distinct longitudinal points over seven months.
The goal was to see how much sensitive data they could intercept by “passively scanning as many GEO transmissions from a single vantage point on Earth as possible.” It was also to prove that you don’t need to be a well-resourced foreign intelligence service or have deep pockets to pull it off.
What they found was unsettling: “Many organizations appear to treat satellite[s] as any other internal link in their private networks. Our study provides concrete evidence that network-layer encryption protocols like IPSec are far from standard on internal networks,” write authors Wenyi Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger and Aaron Schulman.
They note that “severity” of their findings suggest “many organizations do not routinely monitor the security of their own satellite communication links” and that content scrambling “is surprisingly unlikely to be used for private networks using GEO satellite to backhaul IP network traffic from remote areas.”
“Given that any individual with a clear view of the sky and $600 can set up their own GEO interception station from Earth, one would expect that GEO satellite links carrying sensitive commercial and government network traffic would use standardized link and/or network layer encryption to prevent eavesdroppers,” the researchers wrote.
Wired first reported on the academic study.
Researchers reached out to major businesses and organizations that were leaking data via satellite communications to notify them and address the vulnerabilities, but said they declined to engage in any bug bounties that included a nondisclosure agreement.
The researchers said discussions with the U.S. military, the Mexican government, T-Mobile, AT&T, IntelSat, Panasonic Avionics, WiBo and KPU all took place between December 2024 and July 2025 as the study was ongoing.
Satellites are outfitted with multiple transponders to collect different kinds of telemetry, and here the research focuses on a single type — Ku-Band transponders — that are heavily used for internet and television services. Using their consumer-grade equipment, the researchers were able to tap into 411 different transponders around the globe, collecting reams of sensitive data in the process.
They observed unencrypted data for T-Mobile users, including plaintext user SMS messages, voice call contents, user internet traffic, metadata, browsing history and cellular network signaling protocols, leaking out over the skies. Over a single, nine-hour listening session, the dish picked up phone numbers and metadata for 2,711 individuals. Similar leakages were spotted for calls over Mexican telecoms TelMex and WiBo, and Alaskan telecom KPU Telecommunications.
They also picked up unencrypted and encrypted traffic coming from U.S. military sea vessels, including plaintext that included the ships’ names — something the researchers said allowed them to determine they were all “formerly privately-owned ships” that are now owned by the government. Meanwhile, unencrypted HTTP traffic leaking out through the satellites gave them details into internal applications and systems used for infrastructure, logistics and administrative management.
The researchers say that while this kind of capability isn’t novel, previous research has suggested that only foreign governments and well-resourced companies have the capabilities to conduct such widespread monitoring. Their study, which developed a new way to parse through issues around signal quality, suggests that the barrier of entry is far lower than previously thought, requiring technical knowhow and just a few hundred dollars worth of commercial tech.
“To our knowledge, our threat model of using low-cost consumer grade satellite equipment to comprehensively survey GEO satellite usage has not been explored before in the academic literature.”
The findings underscore how much governments and businesses rely on standard satellite communications today to move their data around, and the lack of security attention these critical nodes receive compared to other technologies.The federal government has designated 16 sectors of society and industry as “critical infrastructure” and prioritized these sectors for additional security investment and assistance. Space is not one of those sectors, though policymakers have pushed the idea as a means to quickly retrofit our space-based communications for security.