Beyond the Horizon: Innovative Approaches to Space Cyberattack Scenarios

The talk starts from a concern that public discussion of space cyber risk leans on a few stock stories, mostly jamming and spoofing. The speakers describe an NSF-funded study that brought together cyber specialists, aerospace engineers, space lawyers, ethicists and science fiction authors to imagine less obvious attacks. They stress how much daily life depends on satellites for navigation, communications, timing and weather monitoring, and they recall the 2022 Viasat disruption as a real example of a space-linked outage.

The middle section covers what makes the attack surface grow. Crowded orbits, aging hardware, weak security in small research satellites, long development cycles and decades-old space law all came up. The team presented the ICARUS matrix, a threat-modelling grid that combines threat actors, motivations, technical means and affected victims. Choosing one entry from each axis yields a scenario, which can then be checked with aerospace and cyber experts. Emerging technologies such as AI, autonomy and in-orbit robotics add further risk, with examples including data poisoning of Earth-observation classifiers and attacks on remote industrial platforms.

The closing part walks through example scenarios, such as an environmentally motivated actor interfering with wildfire monitoring. The speakers point to educational competitions as a way for newcomers to start learning. The practical takeaway is to treat space systems as cyber-physical systems, build scenarios with mixed expertise, and look past jamming when assessing risk.