Data Breach at NASA Exposes Employees’ Data

An internal memo was sent to employees at NASA to inform them of a data breach that was identified on 23 October.

Personal information of some current and former employees of NASA were stolen in a data breach in October, CNET's sister site ZDNet reported on Wednesday.

In an internal memo sent to all employees, NASA admitted on Wednesday to getting hacked almost two months after the breach was discovered, the report said.

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 employees’ personal data.

The scope of the breach and the number of affected employees are also not known, according to the report.

But the agency took the step of notifying all employees so that they could take preventative action.

NASA discovered the hack on 23 October and said that it was working with federal cybersecurity partners "to examine the servers to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration and identify potentially affected individuals."

“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.”

Bob Gibbs, NASA Assistant Administrator

NASA also suffered similar security breaches in 2011 and 2016, the ZDNet report said.