Detecting Ship Satellite Communication Systems on the Open Internet

Maritime security is an ever-growing problem, and SATCOM systems available on the open Internet provide an attack vector for bad actors. This research paper presents an analysis of the availability of SATCOM terminals on the open Internet using the Shodan search engine. The study focuses on two popular SATCOM terminal models/interfaces, Sailor and Intellian. The terminals are available in old and new models/interfaces. The general results are that the older models have shown a decrease in availability while the newer ones showed an increase or at least maintained the number of available systems. The study concludes that openly available maritime SATCOM systems still are a prevalent problem and that the maritime industry has not made significant progress in addressing this issue.