NASA spacecraft has its Twitter hacked by someone’s butt

Popular Science reports:

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft looks for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. This morning, Kepler’s Twitter account got hacked… and showed its 569,000 followers a moon.

The hacker(s?) pinned a tweet displaying a red underwear-clad butt, which has since been deleted, but not before showing up on the NASA homepage.

Sadly, it’s not unusual to encounter Twitter accounts hijacked by porn spammers in this way. Your best defence? Choose a strong, hard-to-crack, unique password for your Twitter account and enable two-step verification to make it harder for hackers to break in.

It is also good practice to periodically check what applications and third-party sites you have connected to your Twitter account, and revoke access to anything you don’t need any longer.

Uranus, anybody? I’ll get my coat…

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.