Becoming a space computer hacker

Gregory Falco, PhD ’18, does very cool things, but unfortunately, he can’t talk about a lot of them. An assistant professor in Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, he develops ways to safeguard US space systems from hacking, cyberattacks, and directed energy weapons. He also works on space security as the director of Cornell’s Aerospace Adversary Lab.  

Back in the days of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, NASA didn’t need to worry about cyberattacks. But space and satellite systems are now crucial to our economic, communications, and defense infrastructure, making space security a major issue. Hackers, both individuals and nations, have mounted major attacks on NASA, other civilian space agencies and companies, and US military space systems. And not enough is being done to combat the threat, Falco says. 

Falco didn’t initially intend to become a space computer hacker. An undergraduate degree in hotel administration led to an executive position at the IT management consulting company Accenture, where he led smart cities efforts. That became the gateway that led him into digital security and to MIT. 

While earning his PhD in cybersecurity, Falco also founded the industrial internet security company NeuroMesh in 2016. Then, at an international competition hosted at MIT, he was exposed to the space business. “NASA JPL happened to have a booth there, and they asked, ‘How would you like to hack into a space system instead of the electric grid?’ And I said, ‘That’s badass,’” he recalls with a laugh. “That’s what changed my trajectory.” JPL proceeded to fund his doctoral research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

After graduation, Falco did a postdoc at Stanford and was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins before settling at Cornell. “I’ve been actively involved in the national security and policy community, trying to apply some of the research that we’re doing in the lab [at Cornell] and then make sure that we are not caught by surprise as a nation from a policy, regulatory, and geopolitics standpoint,” he says. 

Falco is founding chair of the working group creating the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Standard for Space System Cybersecurity; 200 individuals and more than 25 countries are involved. He is also NATO country director for a new program called HEIST that reroutes data from submarine communication cables (the path for 95% of the world’s internet traffic) to satcom networks in the event of subsea attacks.