With that basic assumption in mind, IOActive decided to assess the vulnerability of communication satellites. In a nutshell, here's what it found:
... malicious actors could abuse all of the devices ... The vulnerabilities included what would appear to be backdoors, hard-coded credentials, undocumented and/or insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms. In addition to design flaws, IOActive also uncovered a number of features in the devices that clearly pose security risks.

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