Hacktivist group Anonymous recently breached NASA, stealing somewhere between 100 and 276GB of data, the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology says. The data was stolen from NASA’s servers and drones, and include drone video and radar footage, flight logs and employee information.
Anonymous claims NASA is not telling the truth about global warming ‚Äì it wants the agency to disclose the ‘actual’ amount of radioactive chemicals in the upper atmosphere, and threatens to release the data unless NASA complies within a month.
The group targeted specific data – drone footage in particular, as it contains records of chemical samples from the upper atmosphere. The stolen data was allegedly already given to WikiLeaks and The Guardian. No word from NASA or the FBI at this point.
No one really knows how Anonymous managed to find their way inside NASA. There have been speculations that the group managed to buy its way in – purchasing its foothold from someone within the agency. They might have even bruteforced their way in – the group claims to have used a sniffing program to steal a system administrator password.
The group split in two, with one part targeting NASA’s systems and stealing data, while the other was sniffing through it. Anonymous says it spent months inside the system and deleted all indicators of ever being present on the network.
James Scott, Co-Founder of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology finds it hard to believe that NASA couldn’t have defended against this attack.
“First, it’s hard to believe that NASA hasn’t made use of a virtually unlimited budget to allocate funds to create the most technologically sophisticated cyber-barricade around their techno-infrastructure,” he says.
