The twitter account of the NASA Director and Sr Technologist for Air Transportation Sytem Mr. Parimal Kopardekar (@nasapk) was hacked by the 'Powerful Greek Army' group reports Pierluigi Paganini from Security Affairs.
After making contact with the hackers, Paganini said that they had no intention on doing anything bad with the NASA director's account but rather to test security flaws.
"I contacted the group for a comment, a spokesman told me that they have targeted the NASA Director for fun, the attack was not politically motivated. They have chosen Kopardekar because they were looking for someone who works at NASA.
"I asked them how did they hack the account and they claim to have an exploit that allows them to take over Twitter accounts, but I was not able to verify it.
"The group told me that they are hacking for fun to demonstrate that “that nobody is safe online.” writes Paganini.
In April 2020, writes Paganini, the same group compromised the twitter account of the vice-speakers of the Greek Parliament and KINAL MP, Odysseas Konstantinopoulos.
At the time, they had posted the following declaration:
“Government we have warned you. Do not lie to your own people again” states one of the messages published by the compromised account, while in another message he posted, he said:” To clarify something. We do NOT have an issue with this one, with the one with whom we have a big issue is the government and its moves. Friendship”.
The list of victims of the group is long and includes Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Finance, Bank of Nigeria, The National Bank of North Macedonia, and Ministry of Defence Of Azerbaijan.
RESOURCE | ABOUT PARIMAL KOPARDEKAR
Parimal Kopardekar is a senior technologist for NASA as the Air Transportation Systems and principal investigator for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management project at the NASA Ames Research Centre. He holds a doctorate and master’s in industrial engineering and bachelor’s degree in production engineering.
He is the recipient of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals in the promising innovation category for the UTM system in 2018.
Parimal Kopardekar is the inventor of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) and the Director of NASA Aeronautics Research Institute The UTM software was recognized as the 2019 NASA Software Of the Year and the UTM patent, the 2020 NASA Government Invention Of the Year.
The UTM system was developed by NASA in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and over 100 industry and academia partners. The UTM system enables automated airspace access to small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (aka drones) to operate in low altitude airspace below 400 ft (120 m). The operational version of the UTM system is being deployed by the FAA and is known as Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC). LAANC is currently available at 726 airports around the United States
[Wiki]