How much does it cost to hack a Starlink dish?

It appears there is a pretty easy way to hack into SpaceX’s Starlink system. Lennert Wouters of KU Leuven university in Belgium discovered the vulnerability and recently demonstrated it at the Black Hat Security Conference.

Starlink provides Internet services using satellites in orbit and a dish that customers install outside their home in order to receive Internet signals. Using just $25 worth of materials, Wouters was able to build a device that can hack into any Starlink dish. It works by temporarily shorting the system with a fault injection attack, which disables the dish’s security measures, granting the hacker access.

Wouters reportedly informed Starlink of the vulnerability last year and was even rewarded through their bug bounty program. However, Wouters was able to get around the patches that the company issued at the time, finding that the core vulnerability still exists and will require a much more involved fix. Starlink has confirmed that it is still working on a new update to better repair the vulnerability.