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.

I’m a software engineer in space and the things I’ve heard are astounding. Basically space software as a sector is super backwards and operated under a “We’re too far away to be hacked” mentality for way too long. Thankfully, that is changing, and the EU Space Act mandates cybersec in some cases

What I observe is not so much a “we’re too far away to be hacked” mentality, but rather a lackluster approach to software: “Software is just the cream on top that enables the real power of the hardware. So let’s have our hardware engineers do the software as a side exercise. Surely it can’t be that hard.” Then you get hardware engineers, most of whom are fucking stupid in terms of SW development, writing flight software.