How Hackers Legally Hijacked a Decommissioned Satellite for Live Streaming

At DEF CON, the hacker group Shadytel, represented by Karl Koscher, showed how they legally transmitted data from a retired Canadian geostationary satellite located 35,786 km above Earth.

The 2005‑launched satellite had completed its mission and was decommissioned, making it freely usable for anyone with the right equipment.

By gaining access to an unused uplink facility equipped with the necessary hardware, the team could broadcast to the satellite. They also held an uplink license and a lease on the satellite’s transponder.

Using this setup, they streamed the ToorCon conference and classic hacker movies such as “WarGames,” adding a telephone‑conference channel thanks to the extra bandwidth.

The satellite, Anik F1R, entered end‑of‑life in 2020 and was moved to a graveyard orbit in November 2021, after which it became available to anyone able to connect.

All they needed was a $300 HackRF, a software‑defined radio capable of transmitting and receiving 1 MHz‑6 GHz signals, to send their own content to the satellite.

They discovered that the satellite simply repeats any received signal without authentication; the strongest signal dominates, otherwise the satellite echoes the transmission unchanged.