LEO satellites, Starlink direct-to-cell, GPS spoofing, SATCOM links.
Launched on 10 July 1962 (a privately funded AT&T satellite launched by NASA), Telstar 1 relayed the first public live transatlantic television on 23 July 1962. Radiation from the US Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test, detonated the day before launch, contributed to its command system failing in November 1962.
John R. MacDougall overpowered HBO's satellite broadcast feed with a 2,000-watt transmitter to protest unscrambling subscription fees, exposing commercial satellite uplink vulnerabilities.
An unknown pirate broadcaster overpowered the terrestrial microwave Studio-Transmitter Links (STL) of WGN-TV and PBS station WTTW in Chicago, broadcasting distorted Max Headroom audio and video into thousands of homes.
At IEEE Security & Privacy 2012, Driessen, Hund, Willems, Paar and Holz (Ruhr-University Bochum) published the first public analysis of the secret ciphers protecting GMR-1 and GMR-2 satellite phone calls and showed both were weak.
On 9 September 2015 Kaspersky Lab reported that the Russian-speaking Turla APT had, since as early as 2007, hidden its command-and-control servers behind IP addresses of legitimate satellite internet subscribers, mostly of DVB-S providers in the Middle East and Africa.
Minutes before Russia's invasion on 24 February 2022, a wiper attack against Viasat's KA-SAT ground infrastructure took roughly 45,000 modems offline across Ukraine and Central Europe — the first major cyber-physical attack on a civilian satellite network during wartime.
SpaceX Starlink and T-Mobile rolled out commercial Direct-to-Cell satellite service, deploying LEO satellites equipped with onboard 3GPP eNodeB cellular base stations connecting standard unmodified LTE/5G smartphones from space.