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NASA said the damage was "obvious" but did not pose a risk to astronauts' safety.
A NASA computer system which was due to be flown to the International Space Station has been purposefully damaged in what the US space agency is describing as an act of “obvious” sabotage.
Damage to wiring in a network box was discovered earlier this month, prior to the computer being loaded onto the shuttle. NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Operations, William Gerstenmaier, said the damage, in which wires had been deliberately cut, was “very obvious” and “easy to detect”.
None of the lives of its astronauts had been endangered, NASA stressed.
The computer, which NASA described as ‘non-essential’, is designed to collect and relay data from sensors which pick up vibrations on the International Space Station’s external trusses.
The damage is believed to be the first act of sabotage of flight equipment NASA has experienced, but the act of IT sabotage itself – particularly that perpetrated by individuals working within or for the organisation in question – is surprisingly common.
According to the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Institute’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the majority of so-called ‘insider’ security breaches reported in 2006 involved IT sabotage, with fraud second and theft of information third.
The majority of insider IT sabotage incidents are perpetrated by those working within the IT department, according to Dawn Cappelli, senior technical researcher at CERT. Extensive research into the psychological profiles of IT sabotage culprits, performed by Cappelli and her team, suggest that IT workers are more predisposed towards acts of sabotage because the profession is typically associated with introversion.
According to research published by Political Psychology Associates for the US Secretary of Defense office, introverts prefer the "predictability and structure of work with computers", but are in turn more vulnerable to feelings of "alienation and disgruntlement".
The report acknowledges, however, that those working within the IT department are necessarily best placed to sabotage an organisation's IT systems.
