NASA's Kepler Twitter account has been hacked, and instead of otherworldly views, site visitors have been treated to a pinned tweet of a woman’s derriere.
Kepler is NASA's planet-hunting space telescope mission, and viewers who follow the account typically go there to learn of new planet discoveries and to see artist renditions of new worlds. Sample tweet: “The largest two-sun exoplanet discovered yet. This Jupiter-sized giant has a 1,107 day year!”
This time, visitors got an eyeful of a different sort of rounded orb.
NASA regained control and the focus is now firmly back on the heavens. The hack has all the classic bored-kid-in-a-basement attributes, but at least one security researcher points out that a hack at this level points to a serious breakdown by a governmental entity that should know better.
“Twitter offers a number of excellent protection tools already,” said Jason Hart, the CTO of data protection at Gemalto. “However, these only work if the user remembers to activate them. Given the current security climate, all online companies should have multi-factor authentication activated by default for all online accounts.”
That’s doubly true given that passwords are not secure, no matter how complicated or clever we make them.
“Making them more complex only really helps to prevent an amateur intruder from guessing the password,” added Hart. “The other, more obvious problem with complex requirements for passwords is that they become so difficult to remember that users end up using the same one for everything. This makes full-on identity theft even easier once that password has been stolen.”
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