The Feds Want These Teams to Hack a Satellite—From Home

As a kid, Alvaro Prieto kept “astronaut” open as a career option. When his family moved from Mexico to Florida—the state where the actual astronauts lift off—his off-world fascination only grew. “After surviving one year in the US, my gift was Space Camp,” he says, referring to the famous kids’ program in Huntsville, Alabama. Later, he convinced his dad to drive up to Cape Canaveral to watch the shuttle Discovery’s final ride, soon bidding farewell to the era of spaceflight he’d grown up with.

So, yeah, Prieto likes space. But, no, he didn’t become an astronaut: Instead, he’s an electrical and firmware engineer who has worked in the telecommunications, consumer electronics, semiconductors, and medical industries. With his combo of cosmic interests and cyber skills, though, he is the target demographic for a contest called Hack-a-Sat, hosted by the Air Force and the Defense Digital Service. Hack-a-Sat is what it sounds like: From August 7 to 9, competitors will try to hack an actual satellite during a socially distanced, online-only Defcon, one of the world’s largest hacker conferences, as part of the Aerospace Village.

Prieto’s Hack-a-Sat team, called ADDVulcan, is one of eight—out of a total of around 1,300—that made it through the qualifiers back in May and are now vying for the $50,000 first prize. Teams could be of unlimited size and made up of people from different companies or universities, as long as they contained one US citizen and nobody on the Department of Treasury’s “Specially Designated Nationals” list, a database of people and companies the government has deemed to be acting on behalf of “targeted countries,” or non-state organizations like terrorist groups or drug trafficking networks. Once the hackers registered a group (or boldly filled in the forms solo), they were eligible for the 48-hour-long qualifying round.