It is hard to believe that this year, the CyberSat event will be seven years old. It has grown ever year, as the relationship between cybersecurity and satellite has become more important. While the hack on Viasat’s equipment in Europe was a watershed moment for the space industry, there are other events in the cyber landscape that satellite can learn from.

In this feature, Via Satellite identifies 10 Defining Moments in Cybersecurity and Satellite for 2023, for the second year in a row.

FAA System Outage

At the start of 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had a significant system outage that led to widespread disruption on Jan 11. While the outage was brief, there were significant ripple effects across the industry. It was a major incident and made headline news across the world. It could also foreshadow what could happen when critical infrastructure doesn’t work, even for a short time. While the system outage wasn’t caused by a hack, it showcased the level of disruption that could happen when critical infrastructure suffers an outage.

Vince Walisko, COO of Optimal Satcom tells Via Satellite, “I think this event is an example of the potential far-reaching results of the failure of a single element in a system or network. In this case the stated cause was not an attack, but an attack could have had the same effect and could have been more difficult to recover from.”

In terms of the potential ramifications to the space industry, Walisko says it’s frightening to think of an event like this happening to a satellite control system of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) network.

“In the case of some LEO constellation a control system is central to flight dynamics, maintaining orbits, confluence avoidance and managing fuel and power. This type of event could result in the Kessler Syndrome and a debris field that would take at least decades to dissipate,” Walisko says. “The ramifications could be profound with interruption or destruction of communications, PNT, EO and other systems taken for granted by the general population. The economic impact of some types events like this could approach trillions of dollars.”

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