NASA hack may have exposed staff data

Updated Date: 12/19/2018

Category: Information Technology News

Personal information of some of current and former employees at NASA may have been stolen in a data breach that hit the U.S. space agency in October this year, a media report said.

In an internal memo sent to employees on Tuesday and published by U.S.-based space news portal SpaceRef.com, NASA admitted to getting hacked almost two months after the breach was discovered.

The people behind the hacking have not yet been identified as NASA said that an unknown intruder got access to one of the agency s servers holding the personal data of the employees. The scope of the breach and the number of affected employees are also not yet known.

In its memo, NASA said that the hack probably did not jeopardise any of its missions. Those NASA Civil Service employees who were on-boarded, separated from the agency, and/or transferred between Centers, from July 2006 to October 2018, may have been affected,  NASA Assistant Administrator Bob Gibbs said in the memo.

NASA informed that it was working with federal cybersecurity partners  to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration.