More networked satellites should mean a tougher target. Kobi Menashe, who runs guidance and spectrum defense at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, told Cyber Week in Tel Aviv the opposite has happened: satellites have become easier to break into even as their number climbs.
Speaking at Tel Aviv University on Monday, Menashe described an invisible campaign that victims rarely connect back to orbit. A payment failure or a vessel that loses steering may trace to a compromised spacecraft, and the operator may never know.
Mesh links widen the blast radius
The structural change is architectural. Older constellations bent traffic through a single ground station, limiting what one intrusion could reach. Modern fleets route through other satellites and cross-links, so a single compromised node hands an attacker a path to its neighbours. Damage that once stayed local now propagates at network speed.
Security investment has not kept pace with that topology, in Menashe’s account. More spacecraft, launched faster and built to shorter schedules, arrived alongside a lower baseline of protection.
Forty-eight hours of unsupervised flight
He listed eavesdropping, data spooling and replay, jamming, location spoofing and protocol exploitation as recurring methods. The one that most worries defenders is autonomy: spacecraft increasingly fly long stretches without real-time human validation, for as much as 48 hours. An intrusion during that window may run to completion before anyone on the ground notices a problem.
The 2022 Viasat intrusion remains his reference case. It knocked out Ukrainian communications nationwide and reached Germany. Menashe said the tempo has risen since, alongside the growth of the orbital population.
Downstream effects run through aviation, road vehicles and shipping. As an example of reach, Menashe noted that roughly 1,100 ships could not maneuver during the first months of this year’s war with Iran.
