As businesses ramp up efforts to secure their organizations against hacking, NASA has released its first ever guide that will help both public and private space companies to bolster their missions against cybercriminal activities.
The first iteration of Space Security Best Practices Guide, “represents a significant milestone in NASA’s commitment” to ensure mission longevity and resilience. The guide will also help companies in enhancing their security and reliability.
“At NASA, we recognize the importance of protecting our space missions from potential threats and vulnerabilities,” said Misty Finical, deputy principal advisor for Enterprise Protection at NASA.
“This guide represents a collective effort to establish a set of principles that will enable us to identify and mitigate risks and ensure continued success of our missions, both in Earth’s orbit and beyond,” Finical added.
Who is this guide for?
According to NASA, the Space Security Best Practices Guide has been designed to benefit the space agency’s international partners, industry itself, and others working in the expanding fields of space exploration and development.
“The guide is designed to provide security guidance for missions, programs, or projects of any size,” it added.
Need for security in space missions
The guide comes at a time when both information systems and operational technologies in the space industry are increasingly becoming more integrated and interconnected. These developments offer benefits to NASA and other space organizations for working together, communicating and gathering data in space.
Since new, complex systems can also have vulnerabilities, the guide aims to provide best practices for adapting to new challenges and implementing safety and security measures.
NASA is working to develop cybersecurity principles for its space systems, which are encapsulated in its Space System Protection Standard.
NASA will collect feedback from the space community to integrate into future versions of the guide.
