Middle East

SpaceWatch.Global last spoke to Gernot Groemer, Founder and Administrative Director of the Austrian Space Forum last year when we covered the Forum’s work and activities on the Mars Analogue missions.

In a textbook example of how cyber activity is often a mirror of geopolitics, a Turkish hacktivist group called Ayyildiz Tim has been accused of hacking and then hijacking the social media accounts of prominent U.S. journalists to spread messages in support of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Egypt is making preparations to receive its sixth satellite, MisrSat-2, that has been built using a grant from China and will be shipped to Egypt in October 2019.

Palestinian terror group Hamas has been accused by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of using photographs of attractive women posted on Instagram as a ploy to download spyware on the mobile telephones of Israeli soldiers.

U.S. cyber security company SecureWorks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, has issued a report claiming that a previously identified Iranian hacker group called COBALT DICKENS is likely behind numerous fake university websites that target legitimate users in order to provide the Iranian government access to university library holdings.

The recent pronouncement by President Donald Trump that called for the creation of a separate U.S. Space Force has been met with some consternation by a number of commentators around the world. This reaction seems more concerned with the controversial persona of President Trump rather than with the policy substance behind the rhetoric.

African telecommunications company Liquid Telecom has made a U.S.$8 million bid to acquire Israeli company Satcom Systems Ltd., a subsidiary of the troubled Eurocom Group, and a sister company of Spacecom, the Israeli satellite communications company that operates the AMOS fleet.

Amidst a worsening economic crisis, largely self-inflicted by the unorthodox economic policies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and deteriorating relations with its longstanding ally the United States, Turkey has rolled out a 100-day action plan to initiate its space ambitions.

The UK space sector is on the cusp of entering a new and golden age. As a country, the UK already has a thriving space sector with leading companies that have pioneered the small satellite industry, for example.

The Chinese government has provided Egypt with a U.S.$45 million grant for the completion of the EgyptSat-2 Earth observation satellite.