U.S. policy aims to shield satellites from hackers
The White House on Friday released a new cybersecurity policy directed at better protecting vital systems in space that could be vulnerable to attack.
The directive, the fifth from the National Space Council during the Trump administration, comes as space is increasingly viewed as a war-fighting domain. Potential adversaries such as China and Russia as well as individual hackers have demonstrated the ability to interfere with satellites and their ground systems, including the hack of a NOAA weather satellite in 2014.
The Pentagon has become increasingly reliant on satellites to provide missile defense, secure communications, reconnaissance and global positioning systems. But those systems are vulnerable to attack not just by missiles that could knock them out but by an array of other means, including cyberattacks.
“Cyberthreats happen all the time, not just from China but also from nonstate actors,” a senior administration official not authorized to speak publicly told reporters. “So we need to secure our systems against a wide, wide range of potential threats. The threats are only getting more serious.”
In addition to national security, commerce and everyday life in the United States have become bound to space — from weather forecasts to television, as well as the little blue GPS dot on many people’s phones that tracks their location as they navigate a city. And so the White House said it needed to act.
“From communications to weather monitoring, Americans rely on capabilities provided by space systems in everyday life,” Scott Pace, executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in a statement. “President Trump’s directive ensures the U.S. Government promotes practices to protect American space systems and capabilities from cyber vulnerabilities and malicious threats.”
The policy lays out a series of broad principles — but not enforceable regulations — that encourage satellite operators to better harden their systems in space and on the ground against attacks, and to abide by best practices. In many cases, the practices, such as encrypting satellite-to-ground links, are already in use.
But the policy highlights a vulnerability that space and national security experts have been warning about for years. And it gives the issue the weight of the White House, which cast the measure as a broader attempt to combat cyberattacks, at a time when hackers are threatening to disrupt many facets of life.
In a report issued last year, the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, said the “vulnerability of satellites and other space assets to cyberattack is often overlooked in wider discussions of cyber threats to critical national infrastructure.”
It said that generally “spacecraft have been considered relatively safe from cyber intrusions; however, recent emerging threats have brought spacecraft into play as a direct target of an adversary.”
In 2014, for example, American officials said China hacked a NOAA weather satellite. The hack had only limited impact on its weather forecasts, but it showed how vulnerable the system was and how another nation could take advantage of it.