Organisations around the world are protecting themselves from data breaches and are always concerned about protecting their information, but they still can’t escape from the hackers. And one of the craziest stories ever was when NASA was hacked in 1999 by a fifteen-year-old boy!
Jonathan Jones known to the internet as “cOmrade” (and whose team was withheld initially because he was a juvenile but was later released by his own father) used his skills as a hacker to effectively shutdown NASA for 3 weeks and almost 41,000 USD was spent to undo the damages that he had done.
He hacked into the system and obtained the source code of the International Space Station which controlled the temperature and humidity and we can’t imagine what would have happened if he could actually modify the code 😮 He is said to have downloaded 1.7 million in NASA proprietary software.
And that was not it, he even intercepted data from the US Defence system! He got access to the usernames, passwords, emails and messages from 3,000 employees of DTRA (Defence Threat Reduction Agency). This is the same system which monitors the threat from nuclear weapons!
As Jonathon was a juvenile when he committed this cyber-crime and incidentally the first juvenile in prison for a hacking crime, he was just sentenced to 6 months in Jail and as a part of his sentence he was asked to write apology letters to the secretary of defence and the administrator of NASA.
This hacking story of NASA is not the standalone time when it was attacked. Surprisingly NASA has been hacked multiple times! In 2008, hackers reportedly from China took control of two NASA satellites, one for about two minutes, another for nine. And recently in 2018, NASA servers were hacked again!
Image credits: The Times of India
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