July 5th, 2024
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Ovzon is a Swedish broadband telecom company that offers mobile communication services via satellite. Ovzon provides mobile user terminals and previously relied on leasing agreements with other operators for satellite service. Ovzon’s first fully owned satellite, Ovzon 3, has been successfully tested in GEO and is now ready to provide commercial services. Ovzon’s first full-service customer will be France’s elite police tactical unit who will be using its services in preparation for the Summer Olympics.
The Ovzon 3 has a proprietary reprogrammable onboard processor that enables remote user terminals to operate independently of a terrestrial teleport or ground station. Revealing that the spacecraft has reprogrammable onboard processing could introduce space security threats. The details of the processor are proprietary, but if a threat actor were able to hack into the processor, they could send commands to different subsystems of the spacecraft to cause it to malfunction. This could range from sending false temperature data that causes the spacecraft thermal subsystem to inappropriately alter its internal temperature or ADCS commands that tell the spacecraft to change its orbit.