Imagine this scenario: It’s early Saturday morning, you just woke up, and are trying to check the news on your phone while enjoying a cup of coffee. You notice your phone isn’t connected to the internet for some reason. You check the Starlink app for a system status, and it’s offline. Attempts to create a support ticket are unsuccessful, your Starlink account credentials aren’t being accepted. The bank calls a few moments later. They’ve frozen your credit card due to fraud. You listen, stunned, as they explain that someone has ordered over $6,000 worth of Starlink equipment in the last 24 hours.

No internet service, thousands of dollars stolen, and no help from Starlink. This is an increasingly common situation faced by Starlink customers. Hackers are gaining access to unsuspecting Starlink accounts, and using the payment information on file to order thousands in equipment. Later, they will resell the equipment on 3rd party marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace. In this article, I’ll explain what’s going on, how to protect yourself, and what Starlink needs to do to prevent more accounts from being hacked.

Table of Contents.

How much would it cost to hack your phone? The best guess for an iPhone is between $0 and $65,000 — and that price mainly depends on you. If you skipped a really important security update, the cost is closer to $0.

Say you were up to date. That $65,000 figure is an upper cost of exploiting the median individual — switch to an Android, a Mac, or a PC and it could get a lot lower. Apple has invested enormous resources in hardening the iPhone. The asking price for an individual exploit, rather than as a service, can go as high as $8 million. Compare that to the cost of an exploit of a PDF reader like Adobe Acrobat — notoriously riddled with security vulnerabilities — which according to this TrendMicro research report (PDF) is $250 and up.

Switch from targeting a specific person to targeting any of the thousands of people at a large company and there are myriad ways in. An attacker only needs to find the cheapest one.