The official expressed concern that sensitive information — notably command data for European satellites — is unencrypted, because many were launched years ago without advanced onboard computers or encryption capabilities.

According to the article the satellites that were shadowed were:

Satellite Launch date RASCOM-QAF1R August 4, 2010 Eutelsat 3B July 2014 Eutelsat Konnect VHTS September 7, 2022 Astra 4A November 18, 2007 SES-5 July 9, 2012 Eutelsat KA-SAT 9A December 26, 2010 Eutelsat 9B January 30, 2016 Eutelsat 3C February 12, 2009

That wasn’t that long ago relative to encryption being done on computers.

Yeah, wtf is going on. GPG was released in 1999 and encryption existed before that too. www.ssldragon.com/…/history-of-ssl-tls-versions/

How is this unencrypted

There was something of a to-do a couple years ago when some researchers were trying to see how strong encryption satellites were using and whether they could break it and discovered that a number of of satellite operators weren’t bothering to encrypt things at all.

EDIT:

This might be more recent than that:

kratosspace.com/…/the-state-of-satellite-encrypti…

A new study from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Maryland has performed the most comprehensive public exploration into geostationary (GEO) satellite security yet, logging large amounts of unencrypted data being broadcast across 411 transponders on 39 GEO satellites, which were intercepted with a simple commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish costing a few hundred dollars.