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.

Comments

Main purpose...

[Dins]

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?

Re:AnonSec = Attempted Murderers

[Baron_Yam]

More or less. There is no acceptable or even pseudo-acceptable justification for this attack.

There's no secret conspiracy uncovered, no risk to national security the government won't admit to or fix, just NASA doing what they're supposed to be doing.

And these idiots deciding to try and fuck it up as best they can because they can. A lengthy stay in prison without access to electronics might just be what they need to smarten up. If not, at least they'll have less opportunity to cause trouble for a while.

Re:2414 names? Meh, try people.nasa.gov

[jc42]

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.

Perhaps, but the US "security" system doesn't consider the fact that info is openly published to be a reason not to classify the info as "secret".

There was a fun report some time back, about the US Dept of Defense funding a couple of academic researchers to study what could be learned about US military forces solely from publicly-available published sources. They spent some months collecting publications, wrote up their report, sent it to the DoD -- and within a couple of days it had a Secret classification. ;-)

Everyone who read the story got a good laugh, of course, but it does serve as an example of the logic behind the security classification system. It's also a useful counter-example of the old "If you've done nothing illegal, you have nothing to fear" mantra. In the US, it certainly can be illegal to be in possession of information that a government agency has published openly. It can even be illegal to know that it's illegal to have some information. (Google "FISA warrant" for some examples. ;-)