A hacker broke into the communications system at NASA and overloaded it to the point where computer systems monitoring astronauts’ heartbeat, pulse and medical conditions were disrupted.
The inspector general of NASA, Roberta Gross, told Panorama: “NASA has a lot of fail-safes and it makes sure that there’s not just one way of communicating so the transmission ultimately went through. But it shows the potential that hackers have for doing some real damage to NASA’s mission and astronaut safety”.
In the past year, NASA has experienced more than 500,000 attacks by hackers.