By Sarah Katz
In light of Iran’s recent launch of three satellites into space, geopolitical concerns could increase surrounding the country’s intermittent threats toward the West and Israel amidst the post-October 7 Israel-Hamas war. Indeed, despite Tehran thus far avoiding direct involvement in the war, Iran has loomed via proxies such as Hamas and Yemen’s Houthi rebels to intimidate both Israel as well as the U.S. for its support of Israel. With Iranian nuclear and satellite capabilities on the rise, Israel and Western entities should remain watchful for potential indirect attempts to disrupt Israeli and Western equivalents, particularly for communication and surveillance hindrance purposes in the face of Israeli attacks on Iranian military personnel.
Alongside the obvious danger of attacks on government satellite systems, attacks on commercial satellites could also risk data loss. Such loss or theft could prove perilous in the hands of hacktivists and nation-state actors alike, including obstructed visibility into Iran’s nuclear activities. Further, for both federal and commercial systems, respectively, stolen defense-related data as well as the protected health information (PHI) of patients cared for by hospitals with affected satellites could be fatal.
In addition to the well-known distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and supply chain methods of attack used to overwhelm and infiltrate respectively, backdoor attacks present a more elusive attack that exploits vulnerabilities in aerospace systems. To explore this subject........