Satellite hacking for fun isn’t cheap

One of the sessions I was really looking forward to ahead of the Black Hat DC event this year was Adam Laurie’s session titled – Satellite Hacking for Fun and Profit.

It’s a session that didn’t disappoint, Laurie is always entertaining, but it also revealed how much effort is actually required to try and get at satellite signals.

First off, Laurie prefaced his talk by noting that he wasn’t going to talk about hacking the actual satellite in space itself.

“I’m playing it safe and just looking at what is coming down,” Laurie told the Black Hat audience.

Instead what Laurie focused his talk on was something he called ‘Feed Hunting’ – that is looking for satellite feeds that are not supposed to be found. Laurie claimed that he has been doing satellite feed hunting for years – at least as far back as the untimely demise of the late Princess Diana in 1997. Laurie claimed that he was able to find a non-public feed from a TV broadcaster that had left their transponder on in a Paris hotel room.

Fast forward a dozen years and Laurie commented that the technology to identify satellite feeds has progressed dramatically. Among the reasons why he satellite feed hunting has gotten easier is an open source based satellite received called the dreambox.

Laurie explained that the dreambox has a web interface that makes it easier to find streams and provides information on what the stream includes. Another open source technology also helps to feed hunt satellite content.

A project called dvbsnoop is a DVB (dIgital video broadcasting) and MPEG stream analyzer that lets the user access raw data from DVB card. By sifting through the raw data, Laurie demonstrated that interesting satellite feeds that weren’t intended to be public could be found.

Going a step further, Laurie claimed that he had created his own python based script called dreaMMap that could create a 3d model of satellite frequency transmissions. With the 3D model the user just does a point and click to steer dish to a particular satellite frequency. One memory of the Black Hat audience asked Laurie if what he was doing was legal. Laurie shrugged and commented:
“I’m in the US giving a talk where I’m tunneled to my server in the UK and looking at a satellite in space that is over Africa – so who would get meClick here to enlarge”
All told there is a financial cost to Laurie’s satellite feed hunting techniques – and that cost is approximately $785 for the Dreambox hardware, the actual satellite dish and then the motor and the mount for the dish. Well I guess if you’ve got the money to burn.