Cybersecurity

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Thursday that SES will lead a consortium of 20 companies to develop and launch a secure quantum key distribution (QKD) satellite in 2024 for European secure communications. SES and partners will build the first sovereign European end-to-end space-based QKD system, with a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite called Eagle-1, and...

PARIS —  “Cyber has arrived in space and here is stay. What happened in Ukraine with Viasat, means it is here to stay. We need to look at new approaches for legacy assets, and this is not an easy job,” said Ruy Pinto, SES CTO, delivering a stark cyber warning last week at World Satellite...

Luci Holemans, ATO Cybersecurity Group Manager at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), spoke about what initiatives the FAA is taking to promote cybersecurity at the 2022 Connected Aviation Intelligence (CAI) Summit in Reston, Virginia, earlier this month. One key change is a shift to a Zero Trust architecture and focusing less on network-based perimeters as a...

NASA awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a cybersecurity services contract for NASA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), worth up to $622.5 million.  Booz Allen announced the Cybersecurity and Privacy Enterprise Solutions and Services (CyPrESS) contract on Tuesday. It is a hybrid indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) single award contract with a total potential value of $622.5 million....

In the coming months, the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) is to begin testing cybersecurity qualification of commercial satellite communication offerings (COMSATCOM) under the service’s Infrastructure Asset Pre-Approval Program (IA-Pre), SSC said last week. “Our office will begin accepting IA-Pre applications for a limited number of assets to perform assessments,” Jared Reece, a...

After Russian military hackers knocked much of Viasat‘s KA-SAT network offline at the start of the invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence officials were so concerned about the threat to other satellite operators that they organized an unprecedented briefing for company executives. Although it was classified, executives without a security clearance were given a temporary one...

Getting cybersecurity right at a federal agency means learning to speak the language of the program and mission managers who actually run the IT systems you’re trying to protect against hackers and cyberspies, said Rob Powell, a senior advisor on cybersecurity in the Office of the CIO (OCIO) at NASA. “The culture at NASA is...

LOS ANGELES — Frank Turner, technical director of the Space Development Agency, is a man with a lot of problems, and he doesn’t mind talking about them. “I’m not standing here today giving you answers,” he told an audience of satellite industry executives at the CyberLEO conference. “I’m standing here today giving you problems. I’m...

LOS ANGELES — MITRE, the federal contractor that runs R&D labs for the U.S. government, is developing a space cyber lab where real satellite hardware and software can be tested to ensure security. It’s just one of a host of new measures that space companies are adopting to harden their systems against hackers, panelists at the CyberLEO...

LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Space Force is offering free, non-attributable cybersecurity supply chain and vulnerability scanning services to both its commercial vendors and to other government agencies, Col. Jennifer Krolikowski, the chief information officer for Space Systems Command (SSC), confirmed Thursday. Speaking to attendees at the CyberLEO cyber security conference in Los Angeles on...