The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed that cyberattackers recently breached servers located outside its corporate network, which it said contained "unclassified" information related to collaborative engineering activities.
See also: Europe: Simulation of a catastrophic solar storm – Dangers
Founded 50 years ago and headquartered in Paris, ESA is an intergovernmental organization that coordinates the space activities of 23 member states. It employs around 3,000 people and had a budget of €7.68 billion for 2025.
The incident was confirmed in an official statement from the agency, following claims by a threat actor on the BreachForums that he had gained access to some ESA servers. He also posted screenshots, claiming to have accessed the JIRA and Bitbucket for a period of one week.
In a statement on Tuesday, ESA said it was aware of the recent cybersecurity incident involving servers outside its corporate network, that a digital forensics investigation had been launched and that measures had been taken to protect potentially affected systems.
According to the findings so far, it appears that only a very limited number of external servers were affected, which supported non-classified collaborative engineering activities of the scientific community.
See also: NASA: Perseverance has discovered a new strange rock on Mars!
ESA also stated that it has already informed all relevant stakeholders and that it will make new announcements as soon as more information becomes available.
Although the agency did not provide further details about the systems that were compromised, the perpetrators claim to have extracted more than 200 GB of data from ESA systems and private Bitbucket repositories.
According to their claims, the data allegedly stolen includes source code, automated CI/CD processes, API and access tokens, confidential documents, configuration files, Terraform and SQL files, embedded credentials, as well as additional material.
This is not the first incident of a breach of the European Space Agency's systems in recent years.
See also: NASA spotted a massive black hole exploding in X-rays
About a year ago, just before Christmas, the official online store of the European agency was subjected to a cyberattack, during which malicious JavaScript code was introduced with the aim of intercepting customer details and credit card data during the checkout process.
🔒 Protect your privacy with Proton VPN
Swiss VPN from the creators of Proton Mail — strict no-logs policy, strong encryption, and built-in NetShield that blocks ads, trackers, & malware.
- ✔ No-logs, based in Switzerland (except 14-Eyes)
- ✔ NetShield: blocks ads, trackers & malicious domains
- ✔ Covers all devices — free version available
The link is an affiliate link — SecNews may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. It does not affect the independence of our article writing.
