NASA Whistleblowers Report Data Exfiltration to China

According to a Federal News Radio article entitled FBI investigating NASA whistleblower reports of Chinese data breach, Congressman Frank Wolf informed the FBI that NASA whistleblowers “approached him, claiming that higher-ups had authorized the hiring of a contractor employee connected with an organization within China that federal agencies already had red-flagged as a potential national security threat.” Congressman Wolf stated that the subject contract employee was a Chinese national “affiliated with an institution in China that has been designated as an 'entity of concern' by other U.S. government agencies." Congressman Wolf also stated his concern that “not only was the [contractor] provided access and information he never should have received — working directly on technology that may have national security implications — but he was also allegedly allowed by both NASA and his contractor to take his work and volumes of other NASA research back to China for a period of time[.]"

This type of security breach is not an isolated incident. According to another recent Federal News Radio article entitled NASA's Kennedy Space Center gets message from Hill on cyber, “NASA has had more than 5,000 computer security breaches in the last two years, according to Inspector General Paul Martin. One of the biggest losses: command codes for the International Space Station. Those codes were on an unencrypted laptop that was stolen in March 2011.”