NASA denies that its drone was hacked

“Control of our Global Hawk aircraft was not compromised,” NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said in a statement. “NASA has no evidence to indicate the alleged hacked data are anything other than already publicly available data. NASA takes cybersecurity very seriously and will continue to fully investigate all of these allegations.”

The hackers, affiliated with a branch of Anonymous called AnonSec, claimed to have stolen 276 gigabytes of data from the agency over several months. That included 631 videos, 2,143 flight logs and contact information for 2,414 NASA employees. They also said they were able to change the flight path in a $222 million drone before NASA noticed the issue.

Beutel insisted the information was all publicly available online, and that it proved nothing.

“NASA strives to make our scientific data publicly available, including large data sets, which seems to be how the information in question was retrieved,” Beutel said. “Our Open Data websites Open.NASA.gov, Data.NASA.gov, API.NASA.gov, Code.NASA.gov and GitHub.com/NASA offer easier access and use of NASA data through tools and shared experiences using more than 30,000 datasets.”

Organizations outside of NASA are still attempting to process the data to see what it contains. It’s unclear whether the agency has had time to review the files and verify that they do, in fact, already exist on the Web.

The claim NASA was hacked was first reported by InfoWars on Sunday. The perpetrators told the site they purchased an initial foothold in the system more than two years ago. Subsequent reports indicated they made that transaction with a Chinese seller using Bitcoin, a form of online currency.

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After purchasing that foothold, they said they were able to easily gain additional access because many of the agency’s user credentials were left on default settings, a claim that NASA did not acknowledge.