This year, CyberSat celebrates its 10-year anniversary, and over the 10 years it has cemented itself as the leading space and cybersecurity event. The event continues to blaze a trail and elevate the discussion of space and cybersecurity.
Since CyberSat began 10 years ago, space has only grown in its importance. In warfare — air, land and sea were joined by the cyber domain; and now space is the fifth domain. The event has always been forward-looking, painting a very bleak picture of what would happen if space assets were compromised. It has been quite a 10-year journey. Ahead of CyberSat 2026, Space Security Sentinel (S3) spoke with some of the key figures from its journey to hear their recollections on the past 10 years.
Lisa Costa, VC partner for Squadra Ventures, believes the most striking change is how the CyberSat community has expanded. The event has evolved from discussions primarily centered on satellites and cyber into conversations spanning the entire space ecosystem like new propulsion and fuels, bus builders, launch, on-orbit manufacturing and servicing, space domain awareness, and more recently, autonomous systems.
“Space is no longer a collection of exquisite platforms; it’s becoming an interconnected economy and critical infrastructure. Cybersecurity has to evolve with it, from protecting individual systems to protecting an ecosystem,” she adds.
One of CyberSat’s main speakers over the years has been Brandon Bailey, senior project leader for the Cyber Assessments and Research Department at The Aerospace Corporation, who has given many technical presentations at the event. He believes one of CyberSat’s biggest contributions has been helping normalize space cybersecurity as its own discipline. Bailey praised the addition of a new technical track calling it an example of listening to feedback from the community and responding to what attendees actually wanted.
“Throughout this evolution, the conference has maintained its sharp focus on national missions by ensuring that the content remains relevant to the unique challenges facing defense and intelligence space operations,” he says. “The other thing that stands out is the consistency of the speakers. Year after year, CyberSat has been able to bring together senior government leaders, cybersecurity practitioners, researchers, and industry leaders. That combination is difficult to recreate.”
Bob Gourley, CEO and co-founder of OODA, who has spoken at many CyberSats over the years, said at the time of the first summit, there was very little awareness of the growing threats to space-based systems. “Understanding some key aspects of threat actors, including the fact that we will always have to operate in environments where criminals and even nations would seek to disrupt, has remained a cornerstone of CyberSat’s approach,” Gourley adds. “CyberSat has a track record of identifying trends early. In our first event we were talking compute in space. That soon evolved into early discussions about a coming age of datacenters in space, allowing engineers to begin contemplating how to protect them. Today this is a megatrend in the space community and thanks to CyberSat, security teams are all over the need to protect these future systems.”
Phil Mar, CTO/VP of engineering for Viasat Government, told S3 that when he first attended CyberSat 10 years ago, it was a relatively small gathering of people who shared a belief that cybersecurity was going to become a defining issue for the space industry.
“Today, the conference attracts many of the major players from the space, cyber, and government communities. Watching that evolution has been remarkable and mirrors how the importance of cybersecurity in the space sector has shifted to become part of mainstream discussions,” he said.
Mar has had the opportunity to speak at CyberSat and CyberSatGov several times in open and classified forums, including sharing lessons learned from the KA-SAT cyberattack and Viasat’s response. “I’ve also had the opportunity to listen to other industry leaders talk about the challenges and issues they’ve faced. Those conversations have helped move the industry from discussing hypothetical threats to examining real incidents and practical defenses,” he said.
He believes the event was ahead of its time in driving key discussions long before many of them became widely recognized across the broader space industry. “The level and depth of the speakers on the agenda continues to improve, especially on the government side where we are getting to hear perspectives from a wide range of agencies. Seeing this level of engagement is exciting for everyone that’s been involved over the years,” he said.
From a Niche to Mainstream
One of the key things that CyberSat did was create a new type of space community. CyberSat brought everyone into the same room before the topic was mainstream, and it helped break down the silos between teams, operators, government and industry and created a place where people could talk honestly about vulnerabilities, recounts Daniel Gizinski, president of Comtech’s Satellite & Space segment. CyberSat went from a niche gathering to a place where major agencies and the biggest names in space and cyber showed up ready to talk and take action. “Watching that progression year over year has been remarkable,” he adds.
Vince Walisko, an independent consultant, said CyberSat has served to support and enhance this transition by bringing people from all parts of the industry together to discuss the issues and impact of the dual-use environment from every perspective. “In the early days, having Gen. Raymond in a forum with the commercial sector set the tone and got people thinking and talking about the developing issues. As time went on, CyberSat evolved into one of the key forums to bring people together to raise, address and establish approaches to the space cyber issues of the day,” he says.
When she reflects on the CyberSat events she has attended, Lisa Donnan, founder of the Donnan Group, says what stands out most to her is CyberSat’s foresight. “Long before the topic became mainstream, CyberSat was bringing together satellite operators, cyber specialists, government stakeholders, engineers, policy leaders, and commercial innovators to address a risk that is now central to national resilience, economic security, and operational continuity,” she says. “That early recognition matters. Space systems are no longer remote infrastructures serving narrow use cases. They underpin communications, navigation, defense, emergency response, financial systems, environmental monitoring, and many of the services on which society depends. As those dependencies have deepened, the need to secure space infrastructure has become an executive-level issue.”
Frank Christophori, head of Section, IT Security Systems for Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), says one of the things he remembers most was a presentation on how AI can learn to protect our space systems and how it can support reconnaissance from space. The German BSI, a regular visitor to the event, will host its hands-on workshop at CyberSat 2026.
Notable Keynotes
Over the years, CyberSat has had many top keynotes from the likes of General John Raymond who became the initial head of the Space Force and Chris Inglis, the U.S. National Cyber Director during the Biden Administration.
Bailey recalls Johnathon Martin’s NRO keynote at CyberSat 2025, when Martin announced the NRO’s new space cyber program. “What I appreciated was the openness of the discussion. He talked very candidly about where his organization was going with space cybersecurity, the challenges they were facing, and where he believed things needed to improve,” Bailey says. “In this community, particularly when discussing government space cybersecurity, it can be easy for conversations to remain at a very high level. His discussion felt different. It was open, practical, and gave the audience a much clearer understanding of the direction the organization was heading.”
Mark Edwards, senior principal software systems engineer for Trident Systems, said one of his favorite moments from CyberSat was in 2018 when Ken Munro showed how “incredibly easy” it was to hack into a commercial satellite network.
Donnan said the keynote she remembers the most came from United States Postal Service (USPS) CIO Pritha Mehra, in which Mehra outlined the USPS’s technology strategy leveraging terrestrial and satellites to ensure robust and reliable communications.
“Space is no longer separate from the cyber domain. That message stayed with me because it connected satellite systems directly to national resilience, communications, and the services people rely on every day,” Donnan added.
Looking to CyberSat 2036
The world of space and cyber has progressed dramatically in 10 years. The world is also poised to take another huge leap over the next 10 years as we start to see the real-world impact of AI, quantum, and compute in space technologies. As space becomes a more contested domain, the security of space assets will become even more important than it is today.
So what might be the key topics of CyberSat 2036? Gizinski believes the conversations will continue to focus on securing new constellations and hybrid architectures. He adds, “I expect the threat environment to look very different. Adversaries are already leveraging more automation, and AI and machine learning will shape both offensive and defensive operations. The challenge will be keeping pace and understanding where oversight and intervention are still needed.”
Bailey believes that space-based data centers and computing infrastructure will be a major topic in 10 years. “As more processing, AI, data storage, and decision-making move on orbit, those systems will start looking more like distributed enterprise and cloud environments in space. That creates entirely new cybersecurity architectures and attack surfaces,” he says.
Space will become even more central to national security over the next 10 years, Bailey says. As the lines between government and commercial space assets continue to blur, he believes the focus will be on how we collectively secure infrastructure that is critical across civil, commercial, and national security domains. “I think by 2036 the discussion will be less about whether governments should rely on commercial space capabilities and more about how we collectively defend infrastructure that is simultaneously commercial, civil, and national-security critical,” he said.
In terms of AI, Bailey thinks the conversation around AI will mature significantly. Instead of simply talking about using AI for cybersecurity, he expects the conversation to shift toward defending autonomous spacecraft, protecting onboard AI models and decision systems, validating machine-generated commands, and understanding what happens when adversaries deliberately manipulate the information those systems use to make decisions.
Costa says she expects the conversation to have moved well beyond securing satellites, to topics such as lunar cybersecurity and PNT. She believes that as economic and national-security activity expands to the Moon, trusted navigation, timing, communications and identity will become foundational infrastructure, and therefore targets. “As these regions become operationally and economically critical, cybersecurity will become inseparable from maintaining custody, access and freedom of maneuver across an enormously expanded battlespace,” she adds.
Costa also highlights autonomous cyber offense and defense as a key topic of the future. “Human-speed cybersecurity will be inadequate for machine-speed space architectures. AI agents will detect, decide, deceive, defend and potentially attack autonomously across distributed constellations,” she says.
Edwards hopes that in 10 years, we will be on the other side of the AI bubble. He highlights the fact that back in the 2000s, cloud computing was all the rage but it wasn’t until the dust settled that the true revolution of cloud computing was revealed.
“Technologies such as scalable virtual architectures, containerization, distributed databases, and modern event driven architecture were developed all of which enable our modern world. The AI bubble reminds me of this time. In 10 years, hopefully we’ll be discussing actionable modern cyber technologies based on AI without all the hype. Hopefully, Q-day will not have happened yet, but we’ll be far more prepared for it than we are today,” he said.
By 2036, Donnan thinks the central themes will include supply chain assurance, quantum-era security, identity and access management for space systems, data integrity across hybrid architectures, and norms of responsible behavior in space. The sector will need to move beyond protecting individual assets and focus on assuring an ecosystem on which society, commerce, and security increasingly depend. “That is why CyberSat will continue to matter. Its first decade helped establish the urgency of the threat. Its next decade can help shape the standards, partnerships, and strategic choices needed to secure the future of space,” she adds.
Mar admits he has a hard enough time predicting what things will look like three years from now, let alone 10. But one thing he is confident about is that AI will be deeply embedded in everything we do. “It will create both new opportunities and new risks, on both the offensive and defensive sides of cybersecurity. So, I think many of the topics and talking points will still be around further optimizing or refining the AI applications being used, as well as safeguarding against the misuse of AI. You might say that sounds a lot like discussions happening today, but in 10 years those conversations will be much further along compared to the very early stages we are in today,” he said.
[Ten years into CyberSat, the live demonstrations and candid exchanges continue: Ken Munro returns to the stage at CyberSat 2026, November 2–5 in Virginia, eight years after his satellite hacking demonstration.]
