The 2026 space threat landscape reflects an increasingly complex and interconnected operating environment, shaped by emerging technologies, geopolitical competition and the growing strategic importance of space capabilities. Threats extend across cyber, supply chain, electromagnetic and orbital domains, challenging traditional distinctions between terrestrial and space-based risk.
At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and growing dependence on commercial space infrastructure continue to reshape both offensive and defensive capabilities. This assessment examines these developments through key trends observed throughout 2026, highlighting how evolving threats and operational dependencies are influencing the security and resilience of the global space sector.
The Cyber Threat Landscape for Space The 2026 cyber threat landscape reflects expanding adversary interest in the space sector, driven by geopolitical tensions, supply chain exposure and the growing accessibility of offensive capabilities. From January through July, Space ISAC analysts identified approximately 105 publicly reported cyber incidents affecting space-related organizations. Activity accelerated following the escalation of conflict in the Middle East, with March representing the most active period as politically motivated groups increased targeting of U.S., Israeli, and allied aerospace, defense and space organizations. Although many hacktivist claims lacked independent verification, their volume demonstrates the growing interest adversaries place on disrupting space and aerospace infrastructure.
More sophisticated operations attributed to state-sponsored actors remain a persistent concern. North Korean IT worker operations continue to threaten the defense industrial base by placing state-linked operatives inside Western technology, aerospace and defense organizations, potentially providing access to sensitive systems, intellectual property and organizational data. Iranian actors have similarly targeted aerospace and space organizations through employment-themed social engineering and "Dream Job" campaigns designed to obtain sensitive information, steal credentials or induce victims to execute malicious payloads. Together, these activities demonstrate how trusted identities and legitimate employment processes can provide alternative pathways into otherwise well-defended organizations.
The expanding cybercriminal ecosystem further compounds these risks. Initial access brokers and underground marketplaces increasingly facilitate the monetization and reuse of stolen credentials, cloud resources, developer secrets and access obtained through commodity infostealers. In January, researchers identified dozens of global aerospace and defense organizations whose cloud credentials had been exposed through infostealer infections. More sophisticated collectives, including Shiny Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH), further demonstrate the convergence of traditional cybercrime, initial access brokerage, data theft and extortion.
Collectively, these trends demonstrate that threats to the space sector increasingly extend beyond direct attacks against mission systems. Enterprise networks, identities, cloud environments, software dependencies and upstream suppliers now represent critical components of the broader space-sector attack surface.
Global Conflicts Continue to Shape Threats to Space Organizations Geopolitical conflict remains one of the strongest drivers of space-sector threats in 2026, increasingly blurring distinctions between cyber operations, electronic warfare, espionage and traditional counterspace activity. Developments surrounding Iran and Russia provide particularly visible examples of this convergence.
Following U.S.-Israeli operations against Iran in February, Space ISAC observed a rapid increase in cyber and electronic warfare activity across the Middle East. More than 60 cyber threat groups reportedly became active during the initial escalation, while Cloudflare observed attacks originating from Iran and targeting Western countries increase sevenfold above baseline on 27 February. Immediate retaliation largely consisted of DDoS attacks, defacements and unverified hacktivist claims; however, Iranian APT activity demonstrated more consequential capabilities involving credential theft, bespoke malware and potential OT/SCADA targeting. Iranian operators also reportedly leveraged commercial satellite internet for command-and-control, demonstrating how space services can enable terrestrial cyber operations during conflict.
The conflict also produced significant disruption to space-enabled services. Space ISAC tracked widespread GNSS jamming and spoofing across the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, affecting maritime and aviation operations. During one 24-hour period, more than 1,000 vessels reportedly experienced GPS or AIS interference, with at least 21 interference clusters identified across regional waters. Similar disruption affected aviation, prompting warnings and NOTAMs identifying unreliable GNSS services.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has produced comparable long-term effects, including persistent cyber espionage against NATO defense and aerospace organizations and GNSS and satellite communications interference. Collectively, these conflicts demonstrate how terrestrial conflict can generate cascading effects across enterprise networks, ground infrastructure, commercial satellite services, the electromagnetic spectrum and space-enabled communications and PNT.
The Growing Wave of Software Supply Chain Attacks In 2026, the threat landscape surrounding the software supply chain became increasingly more contested as developers faced a growing number of attacks targeting weaknesses across cloud infrastructure, open-source tooling, and third-party services. These compromises continued to demonstrate how a single intrusion within the development lifecycle can create significant downstream impacts, including potential exposure across critical infrastructure and enterprise environments.
Throughout 2026, TeamPCP continued activity stemming from its 2025 Shai-Hulud campaign targeting developer ecosystems and CI/CD pipelines via compromised maintainer accounts and malicious packages across platforms such as npm. The group evolved its techniques with the Mini-Shai-Hulud campaign beginning in April 2026, targeting multiple npm packages by hijacking runners within legitimate development pipelines to spread malicious code. Further evolution was observed in another campaign believed to be connected to TeamPCP, coined Miasma. Beginning in June 2026, Miasma was identified as a variant broader Shai-Hulud activity. Across these campaigns, attackers consistently targeted developer credentials, CI/C secrets, cloud services and trusted development infrastructure to further propagate malicious code throughout software ecosystems.
The software supply chain continued to face compromises in the summer of 2026, with reporting indicating at least 7 notable campaigns as of July 2026 targeting npm, GitHub repositories, development pipelines and third-party SaaS environments. These incidents highlight the continued shift toward abusing trusted developer infrastructure as an initial access and propagation mechanism.
Artificial Intelligence as an Offensive and Defensive Force Multiplier Throughout 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) was increasingly adopted into enterprises, defensive cybersecurity and by adversaries. This adoption posed many benefits to propel defensive measures against adversaries while introducing new threats of adversarial AI use. The introduction of AI use to space assets and organizations extended these positive and negative impacts to the space sector as a whole.
AI continued to act primarily as a force multiplier rather than an autonomous attacker, accelerating vulnerability discovery, malware development, reconnaissance and social engineering while also lowering the technical barriers associated with sophistic cyber operations. The emergence of AI-assisted malware highlighted this shift. According to Arctic Wolf Labs, more than 22,000 AI-assisted malware samples were identified between February 2025 and February 2026. This demonstrates how AI has expanded the accessibility and speed of malware development significantly. In January 2026, the disclosure of VoidLink, an advanced malware framework developed by AI further demonstrated this evolution. This framework developed mainly though Chinese AI models underscores how AI could reduce reliance on experienced developers for complex and customized tooling.
The development of these capabilities directly extends to the space sector through the reliance on interconnected systems, infrastructure and automated operations creates additional vectors for AI-enabled cyber activity. Adversaries can leverage AI to improve targeting, broaden the scale and accelerate attacks against space and related organizations. At the same time, AI can provide notable defensive benefits by accelerating and improving vulnerability discovery, detection of unusual activity and threat response. Ultimately, AI is accelerating both adversarial and defensive measures, and how effectively and responsibly it is implemented may determine which side gains the greatest advantage.
Hybrid Warfare Continues to Shape the Space Threat Landscape In October 2025, the International Civil Aviation Organization strongly condemned repeated interference targeting satellite navigation systems. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) interference, jamming and spoofing (IJS) has quickly shifted from a periodic threat to a foundational tactic in modern conflict zones. Only “non-destructive capabilities are actively being used against satellites in current military operations” but militaries will continue to expand electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Additionally, a common denominator across conflict zones is the demonstration of targeting and suppressing Starlink signals due to the strategic importance that low Earth orbit mega constellations play when providing wide area communications.
The conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues to shift modern battlefield tactics. Russia places a high priority on integrating EW capabilities into military operations as they have rejuvenated an EW platform known as Volna Kupol Garant and have been linked to GNSS interference events between 2019 – 2026 via early-warning satellites operating in Molniya orbits. Moreover, Russia has begun outfitting its large warships with an anti-drone EW system identified as ‘Peyoyed-M.’ Russia now demonstrates the ability to disrupt multiple frequency bands from both a terrestrial and on-orbit point of origin, further blurring the lines of gray-zone warfare activities.
While nations involved in conflict in the Middle East employ EW tactics, one of the most notable trends is the physical targeting of satellite-related infrastructure. Within the first two weeks of the conflict between the U.S. and Iran, at least seven nations experienced targeting and destruction of satellite terminals, radars, domes and aerospace headquarters. This same concept is seen with Ukrainian forces targeting and destroying at least two Space Communications Centers across Russia. This activity emphasizes that nations are now seeking to disrupt, degrade and deny access to satellite services on-orbit. While not directly linked, an Iranian satellite did fail to conduct station-keeping maneuvers for multiple months shortly after a primary Iranian aerospace headquarters was destroyed in March.
Spacecraft Maneuvers and the Dynamic Orbital Environment The orbital environment has become heavily contested and congested through a mixture of space debris events, rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) satellite maneuvers and launch operations. SpaceX satellites (a constellation of ~10,000) performed 207,152 collision avoidance maneuvers between December 2025 and May 2026. Space debris has become a significant concern as there were three significant events between December 2025 and June 2026 generating ~200 pieces of debris in low Earth orbit. Nations are actively advancing space debris mitigation programs, but with this comes the concern of dual-use satellite capabilities.
China and Russia continue to display maneuver proficiency through counter space operations/posturing and the ability to conduct capture events. Russia’s notorious COSMOS 2581 & COSMOS 2583 performed RPO maneuvers that saw the two satellites come within ~3 meters. Additionally, at least six Russian satellites are near co-planar with ICEYE-X36 & ICEYE-X37. China’s Shenlong spaceplane conducted RPO maneuvers and release and capture tactics with an unidentified object on-orbit. This maneuver activity raises multiple concerns, most notably potential space debris generation, space surveillance, offensive/defensive posturing and the possibility that Russia is acting on previous claims informing international regulators that it will consider European satellites aiding Ukraine’s military as “legitimate targets.” Additionally, United States intelligence satellites have been trailing COSMOS 2589, a suspected inspector (or attack) satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
The launch environment consists of frequent launch failures (six total) in Q1 2026, along with an increase in launch activity from China. Most notably, China launched a satellite tracked as Shijian-31 into an unusual Molniya orbit. What is concerning about this orbital placement is that the satellite is positioned to loiter over the equator in such a way that it can monitor every GEO satellite from above. Due to its slightly offset orbital period, it crosses the equatorial plane at different longitudes two times a day, meaning it effectively ‘walks’ its intersection with the equatorial plane, monitoring every satellite around GEO over 12 days.
