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Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

141–145 of 145 posts

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#141
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, some excellent magic tricks work even better when you know how they work, especially if they’re the kind that’s based on putting in ridiculous amounts of work or skill/practice. Penn and Teller play a lot with that idea, for example.

Dani DaOrtiz is one of the best at that. He sells instructions for all his tricks, but he's so good at performing them that they still feel like magic even if you know what he's doing. His appearance on Fool Us¹ is a series of excellent examples of that. He palms a card onto the box, and Teller's reaction when he misses it happening is astonishment because it's such a simple move to spot but done so well Teller misse…

I went to a local show of a magician doing the levitating woman where he'd pass the rings across the length of her body to show no strings attached. however, his showmanship was so bad that his assistant was struggling to keep the trick going. when I saw her wince, the secret became very obvious. there she was being very acrobatic suspending her body vertically with just the strength of her one arm, but he took so damn long that she grew tired and her arm strength gave way. she recovered very quickly, but just not quick enough to keep the secret. I felt bad for her as he would more than likely blame her rather than admitting his own bad showmanship and not realizing her effort. It was at that point that I realized just how important the "assistant" really was.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#142
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was exposed to some of this as a teenager due to a (now dead) family member being heavily into telecoms. You could receive and process POCSAG (the protocol used by paging systems) to pretty much read the entire stream of unencrypted, plain text pager messages going out over the wire. You could also reprogram a generic pager to receive pages for whatever number you liked. You could also transmit your own POCSAG and…

Yeah POCSAG is not encrypted here in the UK. You can still see all the emergency information from around the country unencrypted in realtime. They even broadcast the details of the emergency and a lot of times it's not nice. You do/did get some bird watching sightings though!

Very curious to hear more about this. How is it done, and what's the legal status of doing it?

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#143
post #34

Some of the stuff that was extracted from the unencrypted traffic in the link: - T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text. - AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic - TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls - U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names - Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic - Walm…

Did you check how hospitals or governments treat sensitive patient data? They are transported in clear (no TLS) over the net from the hospital or ensurers databases to the practitioners. Not on 80, but still just plain DICOM XML. With full names and all the sensitive data. That's a bit more insane IMHO.

The new German ecard patient system is also trivial to hack, as shown multiple times on CCC. As long as no one goes to jail, they will continue like this.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#144
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that to be in anyway useful for those companies (as a means to spy on their competitors), they'd have to be actively looking into the information to derive intelligence. Not really practical without some serious engineering, which would leave tons of evidence. It's not worth it. That's just not how these companies operate. > there's some people at Google using Edge I'd be surprised if it's more than a handful of…

That's what we have AI for. This type of thing is no longer a manual or manually-automated process.

Sure, but that still takes engineering. Extracting information and intelligence out of the data is not just throwing AI into a pile of data, it's real engineering that will always required months of design, experiments, computing and storage capacity planning, releases, maintenance, operations, etc.

That leaves a huge internal paper trail - the kind of thing that shows up during discovery in a lawsuit.

No, companies like that are not doing this kind of shit, it's not worth it.

Re: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]

#145
post #132
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that to be in anyway useful for those companies (as a means to spy on their competitors), they'd have to be actively looking into the information to derive intelligence. Not really practical without some serious engineering, which would leave tons of evidence. It's not worth it. That's just not how these companies operate. > there's some people at Google using Edge I'd be surprised if it's more than a handful of…

I mean, realistically, yes. But you'd be surprised sometimes pretty technical folks who just use whatever is installed when their work machine for whatever reason runs Windows.

Luckily, the fleet is tightly managed and you can't install just anything.
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