Researchers at Thales just announced their successful joint hacking demonstration where they seized control of a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite. Researchers at Thales and members at ESA specifically orchestrated this satellite hacking exercise in time for the CYSAT conference this week in Paris to showcase the real-world consequences that cyberattacks could have on space systems. This demonstration coincidentally comes soon after highly classified leaked US documents warned about China’s development of similar capabilities that could allow them to seize control of satellites they deem to be hostile. The alleged documents shined light on capabilities that shy away from the traditional approach of communication jamming via signal blocking, and instead mimic operator signals that would enable the actor to effectively seize control of a satellite, disallowing support for communications, weapons, surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance. Thales performed their demonstration on ESA’s OPS-SAT nanosatellite, a satellite about the size of a showbox with “an experimental computer ten times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft.” While they don’t plan to release the hard details of the demonstration until the CYSAT conference, Thales said they were able to hijack a number of ESA satellite systems using traditional cyberattack capabilities. The ethical hackers were able to inject malicious code into the satellite’s system by first exploiting its “standard access rights to gain control of its application environment,” thus, making it possible to obfuscate data coming back from the satellite, such as imagery, while also concealing any malicious activity to avoid detection. As civilization expands onwards into space, this exercise is an opportunity to raise awareness of flaws and vulnerabilities that exist among the converging sectors of space systems and cybersecurity.