Hackers affiliated with Anonymous stole a massive trove of data from NASA and attempted to bring down a $222 million drone, according to a report published over the weekend.
The group, called AnonSec, allegedly exfiltrated 276 gigabytes of data over several months. That included 631 videos from aircraft and weather radars, 2,143 flight logs, and the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 2,414 NASA employees. The group handed evidence of the attack over to InfoWars, which published the report on Sunday.
Additionally, AnonSec said, it tried to crash a NASA drone into the Pacific Ocean by replacing its pre-programmed flight path with a new one.
“Several members were in disagreement on this because if it worked, we would be labelled terrorists for possibly crashing a $222.7m US drone… but we continued anyways lol,” the group wrote in a post online.
The group claims NASA noticed the attack before it could succeed and it ended the hackers’ access. However, they did provide photographs of the Earth taken by the agency’s drone fleet, in addition to aircraft models, mission names, sensor readings and GPS coordinates.
The hackers claimed that they purchased an initial foothold in NASA systems more than two years ago, and that they were able to use it to gain additional access without a problem. That was partially because many administrative passwords had been left on their default setting.
“NASA has been breached more times than most people can honestly remember,” the hackers said. “However, this hack into NASA wasn’t initially focused on drones data and upper atmosphere chemical samples. In fact the original breach into NASA systems wasn’t even planned, it was caught up in a gozi virus spread.” The reference was to a trojan that has infected more than a million computers worldwide since 2005, allowing hackers to access systems and steal personal information.
The hackers said their efforts were aimed at bringing awareness to alleged chemtrails and weather modification.
“One of the main purposes of the Operation was to bring awareness to the reality of Chemtrails/CloudSeeding/Geoengineering/WeatherModification, whatever you want to call it, they all represent the same thing,” the group told InfoWars. “NASA even has several missions dedicated to studying Aerosols and their affects on the environment and weather, so we targeted their systems.”
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AnonSec has taken credit for several high profile attacks in the past. Those include a 2014 attack on a drone belonging to the National Security Agency, and attacks against both the Israeli and Turkish governments.
