NASA hacked by AnonSec that hijacked a $222m Global Hawk drone

Pierluigi Paganini February 02, 2016

Anonsec group hacked NASA network and released a data dump of data online. The hackers also hijacked a Global Hawk drone.

Hackers belonging to the AnonSec group have released online 250GB of data stolen from systems at the NASA, the hackers revealed to have hijacked a drone the Agency uses to run high-altitude testing and sampling missions.

“So yeah, we know what you’re thinking, hacking NASA? How fucking cliche… If only I had a Dogecoin for every time someone claimed that, amiright?” the group wrote on PasteBin. ” Its like the boy who cried wolf but with hacking NASA instead lol But you might be surprised how low govt security standards can be, especially with a limited budget and clueless boomers controlling the network. NASA has been breached more times than most people can honestly remember (our favorites were Gary McKinnon && Mendax’s milw0rm) //you know, when people used to have legit reasons for their hacks. Reasons from searching for hidden evidence of UFO technology to protesting use of Uranium based rocket fuel ^_^”

The stolen data includes names, email addresses and numbers of 2,414 NASA employees, as well as more than 2,000 flight logs and 600 video feeds from the aircraft used by the NASA during its missions.

NASA global_hawk_565

The Anonsec hackers haven’t hacked the NASA systems, they revealed to have paid other hackers for the access to an agency system. Anonsec gained a user account running on a fully patched version of Debian, but the group used it for lateral movements inside the systems at the Agency.

Also in this case, poor security advantaged the work of the hackers that scanned the NASA network searching for accounts using the login and password “root.”

Surprisingly it took only a few tenths of a second to find systems with so poor configurations, by exploiting these systems the hackers designed a map of NASA network.

The Anonsec hackers breached the networks at the NASA’s Glenn Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Dryden Flight Research Center.

Scanning the networks they were able to gain full root access to three network-attached storage (NAS) devices used by the Agency to store the aircraft flight logs.

The Anonsec group seems to be interested in finding evidence of the chemtrail conspiracy theory. According to the theory, some governments are using aircraft to spread chemical or biological agents to influence the weather for various purposes, including the war.

“One of the main purposes of the Operation was to bring awareness to the reality of Chemtrails/CloudSeeding/Geoengineering/Weather Modification, whatever you want to call it, they all represent the same thing. NASA even has several missions dedicated to studying Aerosols and their affects (sic) on the environment and weather, so we targeted their systems,” the group states.

The hacking crew speculates that the US government is distributing heavy metals throughout the atmosphere to control the weather, but these chemical agents have a devastating effect on the human health.

The group explicitly refers GeoEngineering and Genetically Modified Organisms(GMOs) produced by Monsanto.

“Here is a patent titled “Stress tolerant plants and methods thereof,” that is owned by Monsanto, and seems to address all forms of abiotic stress that weather manipulation and chemtrails can cause: Monsanto Drought and Abiotic Resistant Corn http://www.google.com/patents/US7851676

“Since organic plants (non-GMO) can’t grow in harsh environments like GMOs they are forced to use Monsanto’s seeds,” the group said.

“However they are Terminator Seeds, which means they don’t reproduce any usable seeds for the farmer, they have to keep buying more. So no more independent farmers and Monsanto controls a majority of the food supply through the farmers.”

The group claimed to have hijacked a Global Hawk drone used by the NASA while it was on a flight over the Pacific.

According to the hackers the hack of the drone was quite easy, they discovered that the Global Hawk UAV follows a flight plan provided by the control center, it is a .gpx file uploaded to the vehicle.

It was a joke for the hackers to write their own flight plan and upload it to the drone. The hackers tried to force the crashing of the drone into the sea, but the controllers at the NASA noticed changes in the path and took manual control avoiding problems and locking out of the hackers from the system.

(Security Affairs – NASA, AnonSec)



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