NASA HACKED! AnonSec tried to Crash $222 Million Drone into Pacific Ocean

Once again the Red Alarm had been long wailed in the Security Desk of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Yes! This time, a serious hacktivism had been triggered by the Hacking group named "AnonSec" who made their presence in the cyber universe by previous NASA Hacks.

The AnonSec Members had allegedly released 276 GB of sensitive data which includes 631 video feeds from the Aircraft & Weather Radars; 2,143 Flight Logs and credentials of 2,414 NASA employees, including e-mail addresses and contact numbers.

The hacking group has released a self-published paper named "Zine" that explains the magnitude of the major network breach that compromised NASA systems and their motives behind the leak.

Here’s How AnonSec Hacked into NASA

The original cyber attack against NASA was not initially planned by AnonSec Members, but the attack went insidious soon after the Gozi Virus Spread that affected millions of systems a year ago.

After purchasing an "initial foothold" in 2013 from a hacker with the knowledge of NASA Servers, AnonSec group of hackers claimed to pentested the NASA network to figure out how many systems are penetrable, the group told InfoWar.

Bruteforcing Admin's SSH Password only took 0.32 seconds due to the weak password policy, and the group gained further indoor access that allowed it to grab more login information with a hidden packet sniffing tool.

They also claimed to infiltrate successfully into the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Glenn Research Center, and the Dryden Research Center.

Hacker Attempted to Crash $222 Million Drone into the Pacific Ocean

Three NAS Devices (Network Attached Storage) which gathers aircraft flight log backups were also compromised, rapidly opening a new room for the extended hack:

Hacking Global Hawk Drones, specialized in Surveillance Operations.

Hackers have tried to gain the control over the drone by re-routing the flight path (by Man-in-the-Middle or MitM strategy) to crash it in the Pacific Ocean, but…

…the sudden notification of a security glitch in the unusual flight plan made the NASA engineers to take the control manually that saved their $222.7 Million drone from drowning in the ocean.

This hacking attempt had happened due to the trivial routine of drone operators of uploading the drone flight paths for the next fly, soon after a drone session ends.

After this final episode, AnonSec lost their control over the compromised NASA servers and everything was set to normal by NASA engineers as before.

This marked the attack's magnitude at a steep height by infecting into other pipelines of NASA, leading to this nasty situation.

However, in a statement emailed to Forbes, NASA has denied alleged hacking incident, says leaked information could be part of freely available datasets, and there is no proof that a drone was hijacked.

“Control of our Global Hawk aircraft was not compromised. 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.”

Why Did AnonSec Hack into NASA?

If you are going to point your fingers against the AnonSec Hackers, then Wait! Here's what the group of hackers wants to highlight:

"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."

And Here's What NASA was actually doing:

• Cloud seeding: A weather alteration method that uses silver iodide to create precipitation in clouds which results to cause more rainfall to fight carbon emission which ultimately manipulates the nature.
• Geoengineering: Geoengineering aims to tackle climate change by removing CO2 from the air or limiting the sunlight reaching the planet.

Similar projects are running on behalf of the US Government such as Operation Icebridge [OIB], Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) which are dedicated to climate modeling.

This security breach would be a black label for the Security Advisory Team of NASA and became a warning bell to beef up the security.

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NASA, Google reveal quantum computing leap

In an experiment, a quantum computer outperformed a conventional machine by 100 million times

The D-Wave 2X quantum computer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Silicon Valley on Dec. 8, 2015.

 

The black box sitting at the heart of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility in Silicon Valley isn't much to look at. The size of a garden shed, it's smaller than a conventional supercomputer, but inside something quite impressive is happening.

The box is a D-Wave 2X quantum computer, one of the most advanced examples yet of a new type of computer based on quantum mechanics, which can theoretically be used to solve complex problems in seconds rather than years.

Quantum computers rely on fundamentally different principles to today's computers, in which each bit represents either a zero or a one. In quantum computing, each bit can be both a zero and a one simultaneously. So while three conventional bits can represent any of eight values (2^3), three qubits, as they're called, can represent all eight values at once. That means calculations can theoretically be performed at much higher speeds.

Research is still at the early stages and commercial use could be decades away, but a team of NASA and Google engineers announced on Tuesday that the D-Wave computer, running an optimization problem, came up with an answer 100 million times faster than a conventional computer with a single core processor.

"What a D-Wave machine does in a second" would take a conventional computer with a single core "10,000 years" to perform a similar task, said Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, during a news conference held to announce the result.

MARTYN WILLIAMS

Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, speaks at a news conference at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Silicon Valley on Dec. 8, 2015.

The researchers see it as a promising step, but it comes with some caveats -- not the least of which is that the computer was engineered for the specific optimization task it was tested with.

An optimization problem is one where there are many possible ways to arrive at a desired outcome. The classic example is a traveling salesman who has to find the most efficient route to visit a number of towns. As more towns are added, the number of possible routes increases, and soon there are too many for a conventional computer to handle in a reasonable amount of time.

Similar problems exist on space missions and in air traffic control modeling -- both areas to which NASA devotes significant computing resources.

The problem used to test the D-Wave computer had nearly 1,000 such variables.

MARTYN WILLIAMS

The D-Wave Vesuvius chip that lies at the heart of its 2X quantum computer, on show at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Silicon Valley on Dec. 8, 2015.

"NASA has a wide variety of applications that cannot be optimally solved on traditional supercomputers in a realistic timeframe due to their exponential complexity, so systems that use quantum effects ... provide an opportunity to solve such problems," said Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA Ames.

Details of the test were published on Monday by Google in a scientific paper.

The result is an important one for D-Wave Systems, the Vancouver-based start-up that built the computer. The machine at NASA's Ames Research Center is one of three that D-Wave has built. Another is at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the third is owned by Lockheed Martin and used by the University of Southern California.

When the first results from the D-Wave computer at NASA were published, there was significant debate about whether the machine was outperforming conventional computers. But the first-generation system was based on 512 qubits, and it's now been upgraded to 1,097.

The Google research paper hasn't been peer reviewed, so scientists have yet weigh in on the latest results.

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