Hugin & Munin Journal

A satellite is physically out of reach, but not outside the systems of trust, command, and recovery that keep it alive. Satellites seem protected by distance, which is why satellite cybersecurity is so easily misunderstood. They are above the weather, above borders, above fences and server rooms and locked cabinets. No attacker can walk up to one with a screwdriver. No careless employee can leave one open in a café. No technician can plug in a mysterious USB stick during a maintenance visit. Orbit feels like security by physical impossibility. That is the comforting half of the truth. The same distance that protects a satellite from casual tampering also makes it extraordinarily hard to recover. A server can be rebuilt. A router can be replaced. A laptop can be wiped. Even a damaged undersea cable can, with enough money and patience, be repaired. Remote terrestrial infrastructure can also be difficult to reach, but space makes that difficulty permanent and non-nego...

Kevin Mitnick’s Ghost in the Wires looks like a memoir about hacking, but its most interesting subject is trust. The book follows his aliases, phone tricks, cloned cellular devices, searches for proprietary source code, flight from law enforcement and later reinvention as a security consultant. The machinery supplies the excitement. The lasting fascination lies in the human joints inside the machinery: habits, scripts and misplaced confidence that made protected systems easier to enter than they appeared. When I was younger, the technical side of hacking had the stronger pull. Cyberpunk helped create that attraction. In Neuromancer and its vision of hacking , intrusion became metaphysical burglary: black ice, hidden architectures and forbidden spaces entered through intelligence and nerve. The hacker did not merely manipulate a machine. He moved through another layer of reality. Ghost in the Wires contains enough technical texture to sustain that fantasy: phone switches, dial-up...