To jam the downlink, you'd need to be between the satellite and the
ground receiving dish, or have line-of-sight to the receiving dish and a
ton of power. This only disrupts the one receiving dish, so the attack
is isolated.
Jamming the uplink is much easier. All you have to do is over-power the
signal from the transmission station(s) up to the satellite. Encryption
doesn't do you any good. Having redundant uplinks also doesn't do much
good since the resources of the satellite are limited, and the amount of
power you can get here on the ground is more or less unlimited by
comparison. There are multiple uplink transponders (chunks of spectrum
used as carrier frequencies), and you can allocate them in a redundant
fashion, but it's expensive due to the limited resources on the sat.
The interesting, and undisclosed, question is whether or not the attack
is only affecting the BBC? If so, then it's a more sophisticated attack
targeting just the carrier frequencies (uplink transponders) being used
by the BBC. A high power wide-band attack is crude but easier to
perform, and would jam all of the channels broadcast from the satellite
since it would over-load all of the uplink transponders.
Sadly, there are still a lot of old and poorly designed satellites
still in use; it's kinda like finding unfixable Win95 systems on your
network infected with malware. Since they're in orbit and cost a whole
lot of money, fixing or replacing them aren't a viable options.
The only good news for older satellites is both the uplink (to
satellite) and the downlink (to ground receivers) often have somewhat
adjustable footprints. If you can identify the ground location of the
jamming signal, you might be able to exclude its region from the
uplink footprint. The trouble is, if the satellite is also being used
for things like sat-phones, then you just cut off all customers in the
excluded area of the uplink footprint.
By the fact that this was made public, there's probably nothing that can
be technically done about the jamming.
Jamming the uplink is much easier. All you have to do is over-power the signal from the transmission station(s) up to the satellite. Encryption doesn't do you any good. Having redundant uplinks also doesn't do much good since the resources of the satellite are limited, and the amount of power you can get here on the ground is more or less unlimited by comparison. There are multiple uplink transponders (chunks of spectrum used as carrier frequencies), and you can allocate them in a redundant fashion, but it's expensive due to the limited resources on the sat.
The interesting, and undisclosed, question is whether or not the attack is only affecting the BBC? If so, then it's a more sophisticated attack targeting just the carrier frequencies (uplink transponders) being used by the BBC. A high power wide-band attack is crude but easier to perform, and would jam all of the channels broadcast from the satellite since it would over-load all of the uplink transponders.
Sadly, there are still a lot of old and poorly designed satellites still in use; it's kinda like finding unfixable Win95 systems on your network infected with malware. Since they're in orbit and cost a whole lot of money, fixing or replacing them aren't a viable options.
The only good news for older satellites is both the uplink (to satellite) and the downlink (to ground receivers) often have somewhat adjustable footprints. If you can identify the ground location of the jamming signal, you might be able to exclude its region from the uplink footprint. The trouble is, if the satellite is also being used for things like sat-phones, then you just cut off all customers in the excluded area of the uplink footprint.
By the fact that this was made public, there's probably nothing that can be technically done about the jamming.