A Cyberattack on NASA

May 2008

Nigerian gets 18 months for cyberattack on NASA employee. A Nigerian man has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for wooing a NASA employee so he could sneak malware onto her work computer and steal passwords, banking information, and 25,000 screenshots. The man pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison by the Lagos State High Court in Nigeria late last month. He was initially charged with four counts but pleaded guilty to two counts of obtaining goods by false pretenses and forgery. The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said the man did not target the woman because she worked for the government. He tried to scam several hundred women and was successful with several. The man, posing as a Texan by using a phony picture and background information, courted the woman for several weeks before he sent an e-mail to her work address with an attachment that contained a phony photo of his phony persona. When she opened the attachment to see the picture, her system was automatically infected with a commercially available piece of spyware. The spyware, which did not spread to other computers on the NASA network, was first downloaded onto her computer on November 21, 2006. It harvested private e-mail, the woman’s passwords, her Social Security number, driver’s license information, and her home address before it was detected on December 7. During those few weeks, it also captured 25,000 screenshots of whatever she had on her screen at the time, according to a U.S. Department of Justice official, who worked on the investigation, but asked not to be identified.