The hacking group AnonSec has published data containing details of 2,414 NASA employees, 631 videos of recordings from various NASA aircraft and radars, and 2,143 flight logs.
In the text accompanying the data, AnonSec said that NASA was accidentally hacked in 2013, when one of the Gozi viruses that had been circulating online infected one of the agency's servers.
Using this initial access, the team's hackers were able to gain root access to the server in just 0.32 seconds due to the extremely simple administrator password.
The team not only managed to maintain access to the hacked server, but over time, they managed to expand their access to NASA's internal network, eventually cracking three NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices.
NASA used these devices to download and then back up flight plans from drone missions. AnonSec members gained root access to these devices and stole some of the data stored on the hard drive.
Later, hackers were able to view CCTV cameras from the Glenn Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Dryden Flight Research Center.
AnonSec members also discovered video footage from NASA's regular Global Hawk drone missions and Operation Ice Bridge.
While analyzing some network activity, the hackers found that NASA engineers often uploaded a pre-defined flight plan for most of their drone missions.
Using a simple MITM (Man-in-the-middle) attack, hackers stole one of these flight plans and replaced it with one of their own, which called for a $222.7 million NASA Global Hawk Drone to crash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Although the team, having managed to upload a custom .gpx file that controlled the drone according to their wishes, one of NASA's engineers detected a change in the drone's original design and thus took manual control of the craft.
Shortly after this incident, NASA realized what was happening and AnonSec lost access to NASA servers. The group shared a screenshot showing that the drone flight plan breach took place on April 9, 2015.
Before uploading the files they had on Facebook and Infowars, the hackers tried to contact Wikileaks and The Guardian. After a pre-briefing and initial access to the data, Infowars confirmed that the data contained accurate information about 2,414 NASA employees, including names, emails, and phone numbers. However, no one agreed to publish the data, not even Wikileaks.
AnonSec justified their actions by saying that the US and NASA have long been involved in climate engineering (clouds, or chemtrails) and have manipulated local and global weather conditions.
The group has shared around 275GB of data via BitTorrent links.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NySx6A_PO4M
