UPDATED 12:42 EDT / MAY 28 2012

NASA logo NEWS

NASA Denies Breach Claim by “The Cyber Warriors Team” Iranian Hacker Group

As a high profile agency within the US government, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a likely target for hackers looking to make their bones in the hacker scene. As a result, when last week it was announced that a new Iranian crew claimed they’d breached NASA’s servers by exploiting SSL certificates and stole personal information of thousands of government workers, it seemed par for the course in today’s hacker atmosphere.

The Cyber Warriors Team boasted in a May 16 Pastebin post that it exploited a secure sockets layer (or SSL) vulnerability in the space agency’s website to swipe “information for thousands of NASA researcher[s] with emails and accounts of other users.”

In the hackers’ poorly worded English message, “How and reasons to Hack NASA SSL Certificate,” the group said the security glitch still exists, and leaves the agency open to more malicious attacks. The “man-in-the-middle” breach enabled the hackers to “clear the track after each connection in the network” to evade detection, the group said.

However, statements released this week by the space agency reveal that no such hack happened and the evidence is not forthcoming from The Cyber Warriors Team themselves.

“NASA discovered the message within hours of its initial post and immediately started an investigation,” a NASA spokesperson told SecurityWeek on Friday via e-mail. “Although the investigation is ongoing, all results thus far indicate that the claims are false.”

“False compromise claims about intrusions on NASA IT systems are common,” the spokesperson added. “For example, the same day the Iranian claim was posted, NASA investigated two additional claims of intrusions posted on the same web site. They also were found to be false.”

We’ve seen NASA become the target of hacker strikes across the years and they seem to be ramping up. Perhaps as an almost-celebrity government agency who use computers for almost everything we’re seeing a revival of hackers using them for some quick cred.

Late last month, an aptly named as-yet-unknown hacker group with the moniker “The Unknowns,” broke into NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the French Ministry of Defense, the European Space Agency, the Bahrain Ministry of Defense, the Thai Royal Navy, and Harvard University’s School of Public Health. At the time that this gloat came across the cyber-airwaves, April 20, NASA said they’d detected an intrusion and shut down their servers to prevent the breach.

Before that, reports that hackers originating out of China had taken control of computers at NASA’s jet propulsion labs during November 2011 surfaced in March amidst more questions of cybersecurity. The information appeared in a report to Congress from NASA’s  inspector general Paul K. Martin. This event added to a long line of questionable cyber-activity apparently extending from China—bringing a lot of national attention to the country for their hacker-related exploits. China has also been blamed for hacking incidents involving US satellites such as Landsat-7 earth observation satellite system–hacked twice for 12 or more minutes in October 2007 and July 2008—and the Terra AM-1 earth observation satellite—also hacked twice, two minutes in June 2008 and nine minutes in October of the same year.

What does the future hold for NASA?

More hacking claims and attention to cybersecurity detail is on the horizon.

The space agency has been seen by hackers as a prize worth winning since 1999 when then 16-year-old hacker Jonathan James, aka “c0mrade,” infiltrated their systems and stole software worth approximately $1.7 million—following in the footsteps of Kevin Mitnick who infiltrated the Pentagon and Army also at the age of 16 in 1983.

Now that it’s 2012, computer systems are ubiquitous and high profile organizations such as NASA are tempting targets not just because hackers can obtain expensive software or state secrets; but because it’s a giant coup for their reputation and potentially a challenge. The rise of the hactivist through the exploits of Anonymous and LulzSec have also shown that we have more hackers willing to breach protected systems and release personal data just to show that they can.

Mostly we will probably be seeing NASA’s public-facing web pages get hacked and d0xed; but it will be rare for their internal systems to suffer an intrusion. We may have hacker groups looking to make their badges by leaking information from NASA, but generally we can expect them to show up directories from web pages that amount to walking into the field office and walking out with brochures and visitor’s logs.

However, we will also be on the look out for further invasions from foreign powers, because those will be particularly difficult to detect, and it’s unlikely those who engage in them will brag about it.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU