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 a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.