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The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (wired.com)

59 points by ffernan ↗ HN
CAMPINAS, Brazil — On the night of March 8, cruising 22,000 miles above the Earth, U.S. Navy communications satellite FLTSAT-8 suddenly erupted with illicit activity. Jubilant voices and anthems crowded the channel on a junkyard's worth of homemade gear from across vast and silent stretches of the Amazon: Ronaldo, a Brazilian soccer idol, had just scored his first goal with the Corinthians.

It was a party that won't soon be forgotten. Ten days later, Brazilian Federal Police swooped in on 39 suspects in six states in the largest crackdown to date on a growing problem here: illegal hijacking of U.S. military satellite transponders.

"This had been happening for more than five years," says Celso Campos, of the Brazilian Federal Police. "Since the communication channel was open, not encrypted, lots of people used it to talk to each other."

The practice is so entrenched, and the knowledge and tools so widely available, few believe the campaign to stamp it out will be quick or easy.

Much of this country's population lives in remote areas beyond the reach of cellphone coverage, making American satellites an ideal, if illegal, communications option. The problem goes back more than a decade, to the mid-1990s, when Brazilian radio technicians discovered they could jump on the UHF frequencies dedicated to satellites in the Navy's Fleet Satellite Communication system, or FLTSATCOM. They've been at it ever since.

Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations.

Today, the satellites, which pirates called "Bolinha" or "little ball," are a national phenomenon.

"It's impossible not to find equipment like this when we catch an organized crime gang," says a police officer involved in last month's action.

The crackdown, called "Operation Satellite," was Brazil's first large-scale enforcement against the problem. Police followed coordinates provided by the U.S. Department of Defense and confirmed by Anatel, Brazil's FCC. Among those charged were university professors, electricians, truckers and farmers, the police say. The suspects face up to four years and jail, but are more likely to be fined if convicted.

19 comments

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patio11
If you can triangulate them then the solution seems fairly simple: automate the triangulation, and have a pre-recorded voice respond to transmissions randomly with a stern command in Portuguese: This is the United States Navy. You are transmitting on a restricted channel. Your location is blah. Cease communication via this channel immediately or we will take appropriate measures to protect our national security.

I think it would be more effective if you made the monitor random than if you made it deterministic and perfectly effective. If every transmission got the reprimand, it would sound like a joke. If it happens infrequently enough then the users will react like OH MY GOD THE FLOORBOARD IS CREAKING HOLY "#$"& THERE ARE MARINES OUTSIDE MY WINDOW. (Google "panopticon". Yay, I actually learned something in literary criticism!)

Incidentally: even if you can't triangulate them accurately, I'm going to bet that an illiterate truck driver told he was broadcasting from 38.89767 N, 77.03655 E would believe you. Even though he is most probably not attempting satellite piracy from the Oval Office.

sdurkin
Brilliant strategy. I remember a few years back a port scan of NSA.gov would give a stern "THIS COMPUTER SYSTEM IS PROPERTY OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS WILL BE PROSECUTED."

As a twelve-year-old messing with netcat for the first time, it terrified the s!&t out of me.

josefresco
Unfortunately Brazilians are not scared 12 year olds, and would probably not be so concerned with a pre-recorded warning that has little chance of actually effecting them (who's going to track down some random logger talking soccer with a buddy?)
pavel_lishin
Anatel and the Navy, according to the article.
rbanffy
They should fear Anatel. The US Navy has no authority here.
sdurkin
There's nothing special about Brazilians that makes them fear government authority any less.
ovi256
If you do triangulate them accurately and give them their location, they would just start using you as a locator service! Free GPS! Which would incite even more usage.

They'll need to learn to read a map and place latitude and longitude on it, but that's pretty easy.

forinti
This is why Brazil has the safest banking system in the world: Brazilians are unruly and the police is ineffective.
carterschonwald
Could you elaborate on what you mean here? Eg do you mean that if a bank flubs, they'll have a riot, so they take care to do things right?
forinti
I mean that because of past economic troubles, the whole system was integrated in the 80s. You can easily transfer between any two banks in any point in the country. The banks are also responsible for the safety of their ATMs and internet services so if your account is hacked, it's their responsibility and therefore they make sure it's safe (unlike in England where it's the customer's responsibility and the banks don't take security as seriously as they should). My card number was stolen once, and my bank immediately rolled back all the transactions the crooks had made. Also, if your bank goes under, your money is insured, but they rarely do because they are tightly regulated by the central bank. To sum it up: because we had so much economic turmoil, we ended up with a very safe banking system in both financial and technological terms.
tsally
If a bunch of impoverished Brazilians can use these satellites to communicate, is a Denial of Service possible if organized by a well funded group? I admit I don't know as much about this type of technology as I would like. I assume they could saturate every frequency?

Also, a thought to fix this problem. How much money do you think the US is going to spend to try to crack down on the hijackers? How much money do you think it would take to build a decent infrastructure to remove the motivation of hijacking? The numbers certainly are not equal, but they're probably closer than you'd think.

forinti
Impoverished? Brazil is actually a middle-income country, with the South and Southeast rapidly approaching european income levels. Brazil has 190 million people and 150 million cellphones. Most of the population lives near the Atlantic coast in large metropolitan areas.
Rod
I think tsally made a very good point, and I think you're reacting emotionally. His comment was not an attack against Brazil.

I don't think tsally's point was that Brazilians are impoverished. The point he was trying to make was that if someone in the Amazon can buy radio equipment for less than $500 and use it to hack the U.S. Navy's satellites, then there's a problem here. These guys are looking for freebies, and they are most likely harmless. But just imagine what would happen if the U.S. goes to war and the enemy deliberately carries out a DoS attack against the U.S. Navy satellites? That's not such an unlikely scenario...

On the other hand, after decades of misguided foreign policy that has fostered hatred towards the U.S. all over the world, I doubt the police forces abroad will be very eager to protect the interests of the U.S. Military.

forinti
I didn't think it was an attack at all. But he did show ignorance of what Brazil is. So do you, in fact. Manaus is in the middle of the jungle and is a very large industrial centre. So buying radio equipment in the Amazon is not really that amazing. Walk into any indigenous camp and you are very likely to find a satellite dish.

I'm not angry nor emotional, I just find it silly that it would seem so amazing to some people that this could happen in Brazil.

Rod
Dude, I am half-Brazilian and I have lived in Brazil when I was a kid. Yes, there are a lot of ignorant yanks out there, but I am not one of them.

My point has little to do with Brazil or Brazilians. The point is that people with little technical know-how and few resources are hacking the U.S. Military satellites. If the satellites' comm systems had been designed properly, this should NOT happen. If amateurs can do it, then imagine what the enemy could do in case of war.

tsally
I'm very well aware of Brazil's economic status as a country. I wasn't seeking to comment on the country as a whole, simply the segment of the population hijacking signals. I stand by my statement that this segment of the population has very little resources in the grand scheme of technical attacks. Seems as if you were looking for something that wasn't there.
forinti
I dunno, you don't have to be Wozniak to use a blue box...
rbanffy
Believe if I say the Brazilians who are doing this are not "impoverished". They just found a freebie and many of them don't even know they shouldn't do it.

As for the military implications, I don't know why the hell those birds were not DoS'ed before. If a couple clever civilians figured that out, I can't believe no bad guy ever tried that.

How effective a DoS on those satellites would be on denying US-Navy fleetwide communications?

Actually, I assume badguys are already using those satellites for short bursts of encrypted data that looks an awful lot like navy traffic sent via very narrow beams the satellite (and ground people) have no hope of finding where it came from.

Perhaps, instead of cracking down, the Navy should call the NSA and listen more carefully to what is being transmitted.