According to the Yale report, Russian spying could extend to people’s private communications.
Russia is possibly spying on the Finns’ communications in a way that is little known. Yale says that spy satellites, called Lutsch (beam, spotlight, beam of light), are directed next to communications satellites, in which case the latter’s weakly encrypted communications can be stolen and transferred to the ground to be copied. can be done.
Intercepted data traffic also includes people’s personal communications. During the last year there have been cases when the Russian satellite was at a distance of only 400 meters. For example, Russia has been spying on the communications of Intelsat, the world’s largest satellite services company, for 145 consecutive days. Intelsat rents its capacity to other companies. Currently, the Russian Lutsh-2 satellite is next to the Eutelsat 3B satellite used, among other things, by Yale.
Yale outlines four ways in which Russia could pose a threat in space: starting with spying on telecommunications, as described above, cyberattacks on satellite systems, real-time surveillance of a certain geographic area such as the Baltic Sea, and A chain reaction occurred. Destroying satellites, where scrap destroys more satellites.
Read more: Internet outage turns out to be a cyber attack – the target of the Ukrainian military?
An example of cyber attack on satellite systems was seen at the beginning of Russia’s major attack on Ukraine. The attack on Viasat’s KA-SAT system, used by the Ukrainian military, also crippled communications connections to thousands of wind farms in Germany that rely on the same system.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russian espionage has moved more and more online as individual intelligence has become more difficult.
Read more: Russian espionage goes online – Supo lists main targets in Finland
In March, Supo listed three main targets of spying in Finland: foreign and security policy decision making and corporate espionage. The latter is due to efforts to support manufacturing in Russia that replaces high-tech imports disciplined by sanctions.
