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AnonSec Attempts To Crash $222m Drone, Releases Secret Flight Videos (ibtimes.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from IBTimes that says it's not just governments that have proven themselves capable of hacking into drones: Hackers from the AnonSec group who spent several months hacking NASA have released a huge data dump and revealed they tried to bring down a $222m Global Hawk drone into the Pacific Ocean. The hack included employee personal details, flight logs and video footage collected from unmanned and manned aircraft. The 250GB data dump contained the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 2,414 NASA employees, 2,143 flight logs and 631 videos taken from Nasa aircraft and radar feeds, as well as a self-published paper (known as a 'zine') from the group explaining the extensive technical vulnerabilities that the hackers were able to breach.
Among these: the group discovered that the flight paths uploaded into each drone could be replaced with their own.
names, email and phone numbers of all NASA employees are public, and on the web at people.nasa.gov. tens of thousands of em, free for the taking. There's also an x.500 directory.
The problem is they couldn't actually do either action. This is a bunch of hype trying to claim greater "hacking" capability than they actually have. Hell, even the article says they gained access by purchasing it from someone else.
Having worked on those aircraft for the better part of 10 years, these guys didn't do a damn thing. The mission plans would have been noticed immediately as using the wrong waypoints and been corrected, manually or from known-good files. These guys didn't have a chance of actually crashing anything except maybe a couple of servers at NASA, which would have done nothing.
NASA clearly needs to update some of their Network security protocols and probably fire a couple of people, but this is a non-story with respect to the drones. It's FUD trying to drive site clicks.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
From TFA:
According to Infowars, which was alerted to the zine's existence by AnonSec, the hackers' main purpose in hacking Nasa was to highlight the fact that the US government is using climate engineering methods such as cloud seeding and geo-engineering to manipulate the climate and cause more rain to fall in order to combat the effects of carbon emissions.
Well...? Are they?
Given that Cloud seeding has been around for 70 years why would it it be a surprise or controversial that NASA was experimenting with it?
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It wasn't the private-sector-built aircraft that was hacked - it was the government network that was hacked.
Your being naive if you think crashing NASA's servers and getting thousands of employees personal information was nothing
Names, work email and phone numbers of government employees are not considered "personal information", and are generally available through published directories, and certainly FOIA requests (so says me, a former Records Custodian for the Air Force). As well, many are saying that all these idiots accessed were honeypots.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They contract all of this stuff out to the private sector (the network and the monitoring of the network).
Northrup Grumman runs many government networks. (Not just NASA, also Defense, CDC, etc.)
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