13 successful hacking attempts against NASA in a year..

Could you believe that - the world's most prestigious space research organization, NASA, was hacked as many as 13 times in the year passed. Most of these hacking attempts included stealing employee credentials and gaining access to mission-critical projects in breaches that could compromise US national security.

NASA already spends $58mn out of its total $1.5bn of annual IT budget on cyber security itself as NASA systems possess highly sensitive information, which could result in significant financial loss, adversely affect national security, or significantly impair our nation's competitive technological advantage, if stolen or lost.

As per the agency, in one of these attempts, hackers were working through a Chinese-based IP address broke into the network of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL), gaining full system access, which allowed them to modify, copy, or delete sensitive files, create user accounts for mission-critical JPL systems and upload hacking tools to steal user credentials and compromise other NASA systems. They were also able to modify system logs to conceal their actions. A deep review of the NASA systems revealed that the hackers had compromised most privileged JPL user's accounts accessing most of the JPL's networks.

In another such attempt, intruders stole credentials for accessing NASA systems from more than 150 employees. On further investigation in this matter, a very slow approach of the agency towards encrypting or scrambling the data on its laptop computers has come into light, which could have protected information from falling into the wrong hands.