About me / Services

I'm Ruben Santamarta, a european security researcher with 20 years of experience breaking things.

During all these years I've found and published dozens of vulnerabilities in common desktop software, Industrial Control Systems, SCADA software, IoT devices, RF controllers, satellite, maritime or avionics systems. I've also presented my research projects multiple times in international security conferences such as BlackHat USA or Ekoparty.

My main areas of expertise are reverse engineering, source code analysis, embedded security and Industrial Control Systems.

If you want to contact me, please send a message specifying the reason via https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubensantamarta/

I don't accept connection requests without a reason, from people I don't know.

SATCOM terminals under attack in Europe: a plausible analysis.

------ Update 03/12/2022 Reuters has published new information on this incident, which initially matches the proposed scenario. You can find the update at the bottom of this post. ------ February 24th: at the same time Russia initiated a full-scale attack on Ukraine, tens of thousands of KA-SAT SATCOM terminals suddenly stopped working in several european countries: Germany, Ukraine, Greece, Hungary, Poland...Germany's Enercon moved forward and acknowledged that approximately 5800 of its wind turbines, presumably those remotely operated via a SATCOM link in central Europe, had lost contact with their SCADA server . In the affected countries, a significant part of the customers of Eutelsat's domestic broadband service were also unable to access Internet. From the very beginning Eutelsat and its parent company Viasat, stated that the issue was being investigated as a cyberattack. Since then, details have been scarcely provided but few days ago I came across a really inter

VIASAT incident: from speculation to technical details.

34 days after the incident, yesterday Viasat published a statement providing some technical details about the attack that affected tens of thousands of its SATCOM terminals. Also yesterday, I eventually had access to two Surfbeam2 modems: one was targeted during the attack and the other was in a working condition. Thank you so much to the person who disinterestedly donated the attacked modem. I've been closely covering this issue since the beginning, providing a plausible theory based on the information that was available at that time, and my experience in this field. Actually, it seems that this theory was pretty close to what really happened. Fortunately, now we can move from just pure speculation into something more tangible, so I dumped the flash memory for both modems (Spansion S29GL256P90TFCR2 ) and the differences were pretty clear. In the following picture you can see 'attacked1.bin', which belongs to the targeted modem and 'fw_fixed.bin', coming from t

Finding vulnerabilities in Swiss Post’s future e-voting system - Part 1

In September '21, I came across this story "Swiss Post Offers up to €230,000 for Critical Vulnerabilities in e-Voting System" while catching up with the security news. The headline certainly caught my attention as it looked like an outlier from the regular bug bounty programs or well-known exploit contests, not only for the announced rewards but mainly because of the target. So essentially Swiss Post , the national postal service of Switzerland, was opening to the general public a bug bounty program, using the YesWeHack platform, intended to uncover vulnerabilities in its future e-voting system. The first part of this blog post series will detail the approach used to analyze the Swiss Post e-voting system, as well as the first round of vulnerabilities that I reported during September/October '21. Index Introduction Approach Attack Surface Vulnerabilities 1. Insecure USB file handling during 'importOperation' 2. Insecure 'ReturnCodeGenerationI

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