number of cyber-attacks. One government official noted, It is espionage on a massive scale.

Government agencies reported almost 13,000 security incidents to the U.S. Homeland Security Department during fiscal year 2008, triple the number from two years earlier. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (www.nasa.gov) is one of the hardest-hit agencies. The government agency responsible for the nations public space program, NASA, has been the target of cyber-espionage dating back at least to the late 1990s. During those years, the organization has lost untold amounts of secret information. The length of the time line of the attacks is startling. In 1998, a U.S.German satellite known as ROSAT, used for searching deep space, suddenly turned toward the sun for no reason. This maneuver damaged a critical optical sensor, making the satellite useless. The incident was linked to an earlier, successful network penetration at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The information stolen from Goddard was thought to have been sent to computers in Moscow and used to control the satellite. In 2002, attackers penetrated the computer network at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and remained undetected for four days. The intruders stole secret data on rocket engine designs. Security personnel believe this information was sent to China. In 2004, attackers compromised computers at NASAs Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. A technician had to physically unplug the fiber-optic cables linking the facilitys supercomputers to the Internet to limit the loss of secret data. The supercomputers remained offline for more than four weeks. The attackers had apparently cracked an employees password at the Goddard Center in Maryland and used it to hack into the Ames Research Center. In April 2005, an intruder installed a malignant software program inside the digital network of NASAs Kennedy Space Center and gathered data from computers in the Vehicle Assembly Building where the Space Shuttle is maintained. The network is managed by a joint venture owned by NASA contractors Boeing (www.boeing.com) and Lockheed Martin (www.lockheedmartin.com). Undetected by NASA or the two companies, the program sent a still undetermined amount of information about the Shuttle to a computer system in Taiwan. Security personnel had to stop all work in the Vehicle Assembly Building for several days to examine hundreds of computer systems for malicious software. According to U.S. security specialists, Taiwan is often used by the Chinese government as a digital transfer pointas a cover for its cyber-espionage activities. By December 2005, the attack had spread to a NASA satellite control complex in Maryland and to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of Mission Control. At least 20 gigabytes of compressed datathe equivalent of 30 million pageswere sent to the same system in Taiwan. In 2006, top NASA officials were tricked into opening a fake e-mail and clicking on the link of a seemingly authentic web site. The web site inserted malicious software that exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in programs used by NASA and compromised 12 computers at NASAs