So will someone explain to me what the Chinese have to gain by hacking the weather satellites? Is it just (and I don’t really mean just, as in it’s no big deal) that they could potentially put our systems offline for forecasting large storms, etc.? Or is it more far reaching than that?
There seems to be a lot of hacking of systems lately. Why not just wait to hit them all at once? Or do we think that is the ultimate goal?
They probably assume that not everything is as it appears or is as it is labeled, and figure our weather satellites are dual-purpose and used for more than just collecting weather data. And they are probably right, because as expensiveas it is to send up a payload, there is very good reason to maximize what you can get for every pound that rides the rocket.
Even if nothing more than a weather satellite taking high res imagery of the oceans, access to it means access to the locations of surface ships. Ships leave wakes that are indicative not only of location but also of direction, for example.
And perhaps other folks than the Chinese want to have a cheap space program of their own by just hijacking our data while we foot the bill instead of going through the trouble of learning how to launch rockets and calculate orbits.