NASA computers to be hacked
Spam the President
president at whitehouse.gov
Sat May 9 17:23:13 PDT 1998
http://www.msnbc.com/news/164582.asp
NASA computers to be hacked
National Security Agency wants to know if space agencys
computers are secure enough to fend off cyber-intruders
ASSOCIATED
PRESS
WASHINGTON, May 9 Agents from the National Security
Agency will try to break into NASAs computers to
determine
whether the space agency can fend off cyber-intruders who
could threaten launch-control and other critical
operations, the
trade publication Defense Week reports.
THE PENETRATION STUDY of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administrations
unclassified computer
networks is an effort to learn how easily
troublemakers can get
to sensitive data and what NASAs doing about it.
Teams from the intelligence agency will
soon try to
penetrate NASA networks in up to eight states,
said the
newsletter in the edition to be published Monday.
Last June, NSA hackers showed they could
cripple
Pacific Command battle-management computers and
U.S.
electric power grids.
PENETRATION STUDY
The NASA penetration study, which will be
run under the
auspices of the General Accounting Office, stands
out because
it involves a U.S. civilian agency, and such
operations are
barred by the 1952 law that created NSA, the
newsletter said.
However, the law barring domestic
activities contains an
exception if the spy agency is invited to do the
work.
Still, the publication said the planned
test raised questions of
privacy.
John Pike of the Federation of American
Scientists, a
veteran observer of both NASA and the intelligence
community, told the newsletter that the NASA test
breaks new
ground and bears close watching.
This is the next big step in NSAs
expanding role in
domestic information security, he said. Its
certainly the first
reported major initiative of this sort with
respect to a
non-military agency. While a number of safeguards
are in
place, there are concerns about the potential for
abuse of this
type of activity.
But Charles Redmond, the space agencys
manager of
information-technology security, said the test was
not an
invasion of privacy.
NASA preferred to have the intelligence
agency do the
tests because it wanted to protect security and
proprietary data
and to avoid any conflict of interest, Redmond
said.
The tests will determine how easy it is to
access sensitive
sites and whether they can be accessed through the
Internet.
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