At Black Hat, researchers will point out the weaknesses in everything from the satellites in outer space to the thermostat in your home.

(Source: NASA)

The Speaker: Ruben Santamarta, principal security consultant for IOActive

The Research: Santamarta plans to go deep with this one, dishing on the technical details of how his firm conducted reverse engineering on the type of satellite communications devices used by ships, aircraft, military, emergency services, and industrial infrastructure like oil rigs and gas pipelines. All the devices his team looked at were riddled with backdoors, hard-coded credentials, insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms. The bottom line was that they were open to full compromise by remote, unauthenticated attackers, sometimes with no user interaction required.

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About the Author(s)

Ericka Chickowski, Contributing Writer

Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading.

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