NASA Suffers Internet Outage

By Craig Linder Special to SPACE.com posted: 06:38 pm ET 15 September 2000

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 -- NASA's connection to the internet was down for much of the day Friday, the victim of a wide area outage that severed much of the space agency's ability to send e-mail and that knocked www.NASA.gov out of service for several hours.

NASA officials would not say what caused the outage, refusing to indicate whether a hacker attempt, mechanical failure or some other reason was to blame.

System managers, who first noticed the problem Friday morning, were able to restore most service to the agency by 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (20:00 GMT).

"We've been having problems all day across our wide-area network," said Brian Dunbar, NASA's manager of internet online services.

If indeed, a computer hacker is responsible for the NASA internet outage, it would not be the first time that the space agency has fallen victim to cyber-criminals. Earlier this year, two men plead guilty in separate cases to entering NASA's computers with the intent to cause damage.

"It may very well turn out that that is what it is," NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said, adding that NASA's information technology workers were still investigating the outage Friday afternoon.

http://www.space.com/news/spaceagencies/nasa_hacked_000915.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), September 16, 2000