3rd Party Ground System - RD-0002.02

Third-party networks (commercial ground stations, hosted modems, cloud-integrated ground-station services) present attractive stepping-stones: they already have vetted RF chains, globally distributed apertures, and trusted IP space. Adversaries may acquire customer credentials via phishing or purchase, exploit weak vetting to create front-company accounts, or compromise provider portals/APIs to submit schedules, alter front-end settings, or exfiltrate collected data. Because traffic originates from “expected” stations and ASN ranges, misuse blends into normal operations. Multi-tenant risks include configuration bleed-over and shared management planes.