“Generally, our users choose the encryption that they apply to their communications to suit their specific application or need,” says a spokesperson for SES, the parent company of Intelsat. “For SES’s inflight customers, for example, SES provides a public Wi-Fi hot spot connection similar to the public internet available at a coffee shop or hotel. On such public networks, user traffic would be encrypted when accessing a website via HTTPS/TLS or communicating using a virtual private network.”
The researchers reported the swaths of unencrypted satellite communications from the Mexican government and Mexican organizations to CERT-MX, the country’s incident response team, which is part of the government’s National Guard, in April this year, before separately contacting companies. CERT-MX did not respond to WIRED’s repeated requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Santander Mexico says that no customer information or transactions were compromised, but confirmed that the exposed traffic was linked to a “small group” of ATMs used in remote areas of Mexico where using satellite connections is the only option available. “Although this traffic does not pose a risk to our customers, we took the report as an opportunity for improvement, implementing measures that reinforce the confidentiality of technical traffic circulating through these links,” the spokesperson says.
“While we cannot share specifics, we can confirm that our communications lines have been evaluated and confirmed secure,” a spokesperson for Walmart says. (The researchers confirm that they observed Walmart had encrypted its satellite communications in response to their warning.)
“The information of our customers and infrastructure is not exposed to any vulnerability,” a spokesperson for Grupo Financiero Banorte says. Banjercito could not be reached for comment.
“SIA and its members remain diligent in monitoring the threat landscape and continue to participate in various security efforts with government agencies, industry working groups, and international standards bodies,” says Tom Stroup, the president of the Satellite Industry Association, adding that it does not comment on specific company issues.
Time to Look Up
The amount of Mexico-related data in the researchers’ findings is, of course, no coincidence. Although their satellite dish was technically able to pick up transmissions from around a quarter of the sky, much of that swath included the Pacific Ocean, which has relatively few satellites above it, and only a small fraction of the transponders on the satellites it did see were transmitting data in the direction of its dish. The result, the researchers estimate, was that they examined only 15 percent of global satellite transponder communications, mostly in the western US and Mexico.
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