NASA Denies Hackers Endangered Astronauts

W A S H I N G T O N, July 4 -- NASA officials denied reports that acomputer hacker attack in 1997 endangered astronauts by disruptingcommunications with the space shuttle Atlantis.

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported Monday that during arendezvous with the Russian space station Mir, a hacker interferedwith communications and forced the shuttle crew to use the Russianstation to maintain contact with NASA.

“At no point did ground controllers lose contact with theastronauts. That never happened,” said National Aeronautics andSpace Administration spokesman Bob Jacobs.

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

The BBC could not immediately be reached for comment.

Hacker Did Delay Transmission

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

“People try to hack into the system constantly, but any missioncritical computer system is insulated from the communicationsnetwork,” he said, noting that hackers had made about 500,000attacks against the space agency in the last year.

Jacobs said NASA’s headquarters didn’t know who had conductedthe attack, but the agency’s inspector general is investigating theincident.

The BBC report was released in advance of a documentary called Cyber Attack, which looked at how hackerspenetrate the computer defenses of countries like the United Statesand Britain.

The BBC reported that Roberta Gross, NASA inspector general,said, “We had an activity at NASA center where a hacker wasoverloading our system … to such an extent that it interferedwith communications between the NASA center, some medicalcommunications and the astronaut aboard the shuttle.”

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