NASA Denies Hacker Attack Danger

[Paul Howell]

At http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000703/tc/nasa_hacker_1.html

Monday July 3 7:38 PM ET 

NASA Denies Hacker Attack Danger

By DAVID HO, Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON (AP) - NASA officials denied reports
Monday that a computer hacker attack in 1997
endangered astronauts by disrupting communications
with the space shuttle Atlantis.

The British Broadcasting Corp. had reported that
during a rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir,
a hacker interfered with communications and forced the
shuttle crew to use the Russian station to maintain
contact with NASA.

``At no point did ground controllers lose contact with the
astronauts. That never happened,'' said National
Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman
Bob Jacobs.

He also said the astronauts never used the Russian
space station as a communications relay.

The BBC could not immediately be reached for
comment.

Jacobs did confirm a hacker had delayed the
transmission of astronaut medical data between NASA
computer systems on the ground, but backup systems
corrected the problem. The medical information had
already been sent down from the shuttle and was being
distributed to different locations.

``People try to hack into the system constantly, but any
mission critical computer system is insulated from the
communications network,'' he said, noting that hackers
had made about 500,000 attacks against the space
agency in the last year.

Jacobs said NASA's headquarters didn't know who
had conducted the attack, but the agency's inspector
general is investigating the incident.

The BBC report was released in advance of a
documentary aired Monday called ``Cyber Attack,''
which looked at how hackers penetrate the computer
defenses of countries like the United States and Britain.

The BBC reported that Roberta Gross, NASA inspector
general, said, ``We had an activity at NASA center
where a hacker was overloading our system ... to such
an extent that it interfered with communications
between the NASA center, some medical
communications and the astronaut aboard the shuttle.''

Jacobs said Gross had been referring to the disruption
on the ground and not any problem communicating with
the astronauts.

During the September 1997 mission, the space shuttle
Atlantis retrieved astronaut Michael Foale, who had
spent 134 days aboard Mir.

Last Thursday, a former computer science student of
Northeastern University pleaded guilty to going on a
hacking spree against private and government targets,
including the military and NASA. Ikenna Iffih, 20, broke
into computers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md. and installed a program to
capture users' names and passwords.