The NSA Is Running a Satellite Hacking Experiment

Researchers at the National Security Agency are using artificial intelligence to characterize strange behaviors in small satellites to understand if they've secretly been brought under adversarial control. "We're looking at a way to characterize telemetry data so that as we deploy new satellites, we can make adjustments," said Aaron Ferguson, the technical director of the encryption solutions office of NSA's Capabilities Directorate, said at a Defense One event on Tuesday. "Now, if you talk to a variety of analysts, and I have at NASA, they'll say, 'Oh, we've got this under control. We checked the data twice, three times,' Ferguson said. "But we really don't know, because there is so much data that they really don't know if something is going wrong. They'll say, 'It's just orbital debris that bumped into the satellite and knocked it off its trajectory."