Satellite communications are an integral part of many industrial control systems across many sectors, but their usage, specifically in critical infrastructure, continues to be misunderstood by the industry. While there have been multiple investigations into vulnerabilities and exploitation methods of satellite systems, less attention has been given to threat vectors and how they actually impact the environments that rely on them – much buzz was generated by the Viasat outages in February and their effect on European wind turbines, but not on how much the service disruption actually impacted these systems. Furthermore, much guidance into securing satellite communication systems focuses heavily on military applications, which can have different architectures and needs than those deployed in critical infrastructure networks.
