so threat model for satellites is not what we thought.( as a public hollywood goers ). and even if satellite is "hardened" is hardened by obfuscation rather then technological mechanism ( even if it had technological anything in it, which they dont. most satellites are older then 20 years, anyway.... )

Source(s)?

what i did / did not do in my free time, 15 years ago i do not want to talk.

is 20 year old tech hackable ? is not sourcable. what is done to satellites is not really possible to source, people need to work. and even bull is considered secret, proprietary etc....

for threat model: hybrid war is "new". " attacking infrastructure was considered war, full stop " this changed for some reason.

american corporation have 4 pictures of "earth" everyday, in database, starting from 1996... and still even today, you can point antenna up and capture geostationary satellite pictures, not in that resolution tho. ( NOAA / old russian meteo satellites - this was not in threat model. source is point antenna up)

im not talking about things like FLTSATCOM 7 and FLTSATCOM 8 which are known and covered by news.

im not confused about what is telemetry, control, data, transponder, etc

most nonmainstream things / themes are not "googleable". because hybrid war. hobbysite from 20 years ago - cqham.ru has some articles about "downloading" nonencrypted traffic from satellites with for todays standard, primitive equipment

The specs are usually public for GEO meteo sats in particular (NOAA's, Elektro-L, etc), specifically for amateur enthusiasts to receive the photos; unencrypted downlink is easy with them. Controlling anything is another story.

Do you think this was at least news to the ESA?

purpose is test platform, from "ally".

some other comments provide link to mission statement, there you can read it was developed to do tests about spacecraft security, im not sure they ment computer security, tho. you can write ESA, you can find some ESA people on twitter even.

You'll need to have a good source on that because the majority of the latest satellites are using at least AES128 or better AES256 for this kind of stuff. Granted, a few of the implementations I have seen are a bit exotic and probably somewhat vulnerable, and the key management can be quite manual, but we are not at the middle school teenagers level anymore.

And I doubt very much that Starlink or OneWeb (OW is using AES256) satellites are that easy to hack, and they by themselves are most of the satellites.

Many satellites are also able to monitor contacts made from the ground and if someone is able to gain access to the communication stream, they'll quickly (within 10min) have to learn how to hack the onboard software to reset these monitors.

starlink can monitor your traffic in ground station. so you do not need ground based listening station. optical links still does not work what i know. it is kind of dumb relay ( atleast today ) darpa had program which wanted starlink like satellites used for military purposes, with sensors AND machine learning onboard, 400 km is not very far from earth either, so you do not need complicated sensors (optics..) to see / hear / feel / receive things + capability of computation ( ML filtering, ML recognition.. ) can provide you with very powerful platform. . plus on top - with optical interconnects you can transmit data without touching "bad" side of globe XD

so with ESA putting this amount of (american made) computation, you can see where it is going.

im proponent of having telemetry not encrypted, we need this for same reason we use ADS/AIS

there are multiple "channels" from / to satellite. not all have to use consumer grade encryption.