Amid reports of massive data breach, European Space Agency says impact limited to servers with unclassified documents

Following the reports of a massive data breach, the European Space Agency (ESA), in its initial statements, said that the alleged data breach impacted a very limited number of science servers, which are located outside of ESA's corporate network. The agency on Monday (Dec 30) stated that the data breach only impacted unclassified collaborative engineering activities.

"ESA is aware of a recent cybersecurity issue involving servers located outside the ESA corporate network. We have initiated a forensic security analysis—currently in progress—and implemented measures to secure any potentially affected devices," the statement said.

"Our analysis so far indicates that only a very small number of external servers may have been impacted. These servers support unclassified collaborative engineering activities within the scientific community," it added.

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These statements follow December 26 reports that emerged on X claiming that the ESA had suffered a massive data breach, when a hacker put more than 200 gigabytes of data for sale, he used the alias "888" for the offering. The hacker in his sales pitch claimed that the leaked information includes source code for proprietary software, sensitive project documentation, API tokens, and hardcoded credentials.

On December 29, the European agency confirmed the claim of a data breach and said that a forensic investigation into the matter is underway. Later, on December 30, the ESA tried to characterise the incident as a minor data breach with a limited impact.

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The agency underscored that all the stakeholders have been informed and vowed to provide additional information in the future. "All relevant stakeholders have been informed, and we will provide further updates as soon as additional information becomes available".