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Another NASA Hacker Indicted
eldavojohn writes "Earlier this year, UK citizen & hacker of NASA Gary KcKinnon was extradited to the United States (also interviewed twice). Now, another hacker has been indicted for hacking more than 150 U.S. government computers. Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania claims to have led a 'white hat team' to expose flaws in U.S. government computers. It seems everyone else has been busy hacking into government systems while I've been wasting my time playing Warcraft." From the article: "The breached computers were used to collect and process data from spacecraft. Because of the break-ins, systems had to be rebuilt and scientists and engineers had to manually communicate with spacecraft, resulting in $1.36 million in losses for NASA and nearly $100,000 in losses for the Energy Department and the Navy, prosecutors said. Several suspected NASA hackers have been dealing with law enforcement recently."
Read Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" for how these spurious figures are calculated. The examples are old but so is the mindset behind this. The author has put the entire book online.
If a system is that important, and only has a single task, such as communicating with a spacecraft, why would it be accessible from outside sources?
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Indeed. The article is pretty thin on what was actually compromised and what "manually communicating with spacecraft" really meant. Rule number 1 with mission critical systems at NASA (I work for them, but not at the locations attacked) is that they are *completely* walled off from the outside.
Now, there are some mission associated systems that are accessible from the internet which are storing spacecraft data. Here's one that has datasets from the acceleration system on the International Space Station:
http://pims.grc.nasa.gov/html/ISSAccelerationArch
It's out there because that's the easiest way to get the data to researchers, many of whom are at universities around the world. I suppose if that server ended up hacked, it would hit the news as "Hacker brings down Space Station support system!". Sounds bad, but it's not like you can actually gain control of the spacecraft. I suspect the machines affected were used for this sort of purpose.
Worst...sig...ever!
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/101