STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A team of academics set out to research satellite communications, and they were surprised by how much sensitive data was flying around unencrypted. NPR cybersecurity correspondent Jenna McLaughlin reports.
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: When a group of scholars started intercepting phone calls and text messages, internal communications from electric utilities and real-time feeds from military helicopters, they knew they had hit on something big.
WENYI MORTY ZHANG: Suddenly, there is a Black Hawk helicopter.
MCLAUGHLIN: That's Wenyi Morty Zhang, who goes by Morty. He's part of the team from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Maryland. It all started with about 800 bucks in off-the-shelf equipment - basically, a dish strapped to the roof at UCSD, designed to intercept a range of proprietary satellite signals - a universe that very few people understand. Here's Nadia Heninger, another UCSD researcher.
NADIA HENINGER: It was somewhat surprising when we actually started being able to read the data that there was not as much encryption for actual network data as we thought that there might be.
MCLAUGHLIN: They discovered a subset of companies, utilities, even militaries that rely on what are called geostationary satellites, some of the furthest from Earth which don't move in the sky. In remote areas where there aren't fiber-optic cables, for example, communications are beamed up to these satellites before traveling to their ultimate destination. Turns out, with all these different proprietary channels that haven't really been studied in detail, some information was being broadcast without any real security.
DAVE LEVIN: I think there are many folks who either thought they were encrypting, and it turns out they weren't, or thought that these networks that they were transmitting on were much more private than they really were.
MCLAUGHLIN: That's Dave Levin from the University of Maryland. Levin and the group say it's possible someone else was listening in to these signals for years. It took some expertise to decode the information, but it's nothing the U.S. government or a foreign adversary couldn't manage. But the good news is not everything was unencrypted. The TV industry already encrypts its broadcast skillfully, the team found. Now they're working with the U.S. government and others to turn on encryption and plug the holes before exploring the rest of the sky and its signals.
Jenna McLaughlin, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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