NASA data breach compromises data of current, former employees

An internal memo released by NASA to its employees details the hack which actually occurred in October.

The scope of the NASA data breach and the number of affected employees are also not known. (REUTERS)

Personal information of some current and former employees of NASA were stolen in a data breach in October.

According to a report by ZDNet, an internal memo sent to all employees of NASA where it admitted to getting hacked, almost two months after the breach was discovered.

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 the personal data of the employees.

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 they could take preventive action.

NASA discovered the hack on October 23 and informed 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 was quoted as saying in the memo.

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