Satellite Systems Vulnerable to Disruptive Hacking?

There've been a few threads on stories involving hacking, so I thought I'd toss this out there for consideration:

Critical military satellite systems are vulnerable to hacking

Now, before anyone gets excited or panics, this is based on laboratory testing. Nothing's been confirmed on satellites up and functioning.

The firm (IOActive) conducted static firmware analysis through the reverse-engineering of several satellite devices. The services examined by the report include Inmarsat-C, Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT), Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN), BGAN machine-to-machine (M2M), FleetBroadband (FB), SwiftBroadband and Classic Aero Service.

These services are used in a variety of functions such as communications, navigation and military operations.

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If confirmed in satellite systems in place in orbit, then IOActive claims:

“If one of these affected devices can be compromised, the entire SATCOM infrastructure could be at risk,” the report states. “Ships, aircraft, military personnel, emergency services, media services, and industrial facilities (oil rigs, gas pipelines, water treatment plants, wind turbines, substations, etc.) could all be impacted by the vulnerabilities.”

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While the article is from a defense news source, it's actually applicable to civilian satellite-based systems as well.