Unknown Actor Soliciting Partners for Mars Rover Hack

Somebody with a fair idea on how compromising NASA’s Curiosity mission might work is soliciting help from Anonymous on IRC, security firm Flashpoint Partners reports.

An Internet Relay Chat (IRC) user appears to be soliciting Anonymous partners for a hack of NASA’s Mars rover mission, according to Flashpoint Partners.

The New York-based cybersecurity firm on Thursday spotted the following message by user “MarsCuriosity” on the AnonOps IRC channel, which Flashpoint included in an alert sent out to its clients later that day:

“MarsCuriosity: Anyone in Madrid, Spain or Canbarra who can help isolate the huge control signal used for the Mars Odyssey / Curiosity system please? The cypher and hopping is a standard mode, just need base frequency and recordings/feed of the huge signal going out. (yes we can spoof it both directions!)”

NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived on Mars to great fanfare earlier this week and is currently being prepped for a series of software updates that will suspend scientific operations for a couple of days. The rover is the largest and most advanced surface-based robot probe to ever visit the Red Planet.

Flashpoint, which monitors the AnonOps IRC channel and other private channels used by the loosely affiliated global collective of hackers that form a part of the Anonymous movement, bills its analysts as having “deep experience inside hacker communities … developed through years of passive monitoring and active engagement within hacker circles.”

As is par for the course with Anonymous, a few clarifications need to be made regarding the solicitation from MarsCuriosity.

• The unknown actor may or may not be a member of good standing within the Anonymous collective. Flashpoint co-founder Josh Lefkowitz told PCMag that the handle MarsCuriosity was not known to the security firm’s analysts and was likely a one-off created and used specifically for the proposed operation. There’s even the possibility that the poster is an anti-Anonymous actor or member of law enforcement seeking to draw out actual members of the collective.
• The proposal by an individual of an operation like the hacking of Curiosity does not mean an actual, full-fledged Anonymous operation is underway. For example, last year’s proposed “Operation Facebook,” a supposed plot to take down the social-networking site, turned out to be a venture that the majority of the Anonymous collective never signed on to and it never came to pass. Flashpoint told PCMag that MarsCuriosity was present on other IRC channels throughout the day on Thursday but hadn’t received any public responses to his proposal as of yet.
• That said, whatever MarsCuriosity’s background and agenda might be, the individual clearly has more than just a baseline knowledge of how a hack of NASA’s Mars Mission might be pulled off. That’s not to say he or she could accomplish such a feat, even with a lot of help from the Anonymous collective—the consensus of the expert sources who contributed to PCMag’s speculative article “How to Hack NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover,” also published Thursday, was that it’s highly unlikely that a non-state backed group would have the combined resources and sophistication to successfully mount such an operation.

As a side note, given some criticism that “How to Hack NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover” has received by a few readers who believe the article may have irresponsibly “given people the idea” to actually attempt such a thing, it’s worth pointing out that MarsCuriosity’s IRC post and Flashpoint’s subsequent alert to clients went out before PCMag’s article was published.

PCMag’s Meredith Popolo was at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California last week covering the Curiosity rover’s arrival on Mars. For more, see the slideshow below, which details her tour of JPL. Also check out 7 Minutes of Terror: Landing the Mars Curiosity Rover and What Powers the Mars Curiosity Rover?

By Damon Poeter, PCMag