NASA Didn't Even Come Close to Creating a Secure Cloud Network
Like a lot of organizations, NASA's doing its best to keep up with the times and move its computer systems onto the cloud. Like only a government agency can do, it's failing fantastically at doing so securely.
A review released on Monday by NASA's inspector general had nothing good to say about the space agency's cybersecurity situation. The report found that a large number of cloud initiatives suffered from dangerously poor security, so poor that they would have "severe adverse effects" on NASA if compromised. And out of five contracts reviewed, "none came close" to offering adequate cybersecurity. And on top of that, over 100 of NASA's internal and external websites were found to have no security measures in place whatsoever.
This shouldn't be so surprising. NASA's historically terrible at cybersecurity. Seriously, it seems like the space agency gets hacked every other week. In February of this year, for example, Anonymous hit NASA and leaked a bunch of data. That looks like child's play compared to last year, when NASA admitted to thousands of breaches due to lack of security. Heck, a 15-year-old hacker even broke into NASA back in 1999 and shut down the computers that run the International Space Station for nearly a month. That's just to name a few security breaches.
