got geoint?

With all of the news surrounding the breach of the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter program dominating the airwaves these days, there is a smaller and just as interesting story that popped up on Wired about a crackdown of Brazilian hackers who have continuously overtaken a U.S. Navy communications satellite.

Once the satellite channel was open five years ago, many Brazilians have been using the channel to communicate anything that you could imagine — especially since cell phone coverage is very spotty in remote sections of the country. According to the article, “truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations.”

What is most interesting, and almost laughable about this story, is that most of the hacking was done with homemade equipment. According to the article, “pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM’s 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.”

We can certainly file this story in the “who knew??” category. Big thanks to Wired for running this story.

Tags: Brazilian hackers, cybersecurity, hackers, Intelligence, Navy, security breaches, US. Navy communications satellite breaches