Ground control to Major Tom?

The Iranian group calling itself the "Cyber Warriors Team" bragged about their feat in a May 16 post on Pastebin. NASA is reportedly investigating and did not answer a request for comment Wednesday.

Packet analyzer

Also called a packet analyzer, the scanner intercepts and logs traffic over a digital network. By decoding the intercepted data, the hackers were to all appearances able to locate the certificates.

Earlier this month, NASA, which stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the European Space Agency confirmed a group calling itself "The Unknowns" had hacked sites of both agencies. No information was stolen. Instead, the group passed along details of the vulnerabilities, so they could be fixed.

Report to Congress in February

In a report to Congress in February, NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin said the agency has increasingly become a target of sophisticated attacks bent on stealing or changing information from computer systems and networks. While fiscal year 2011, NASA was the target of 47 such attacks, with 13 successfully compromising the agency's computers.

Martin's recommendations included maintaining an up-to-date list of IT elements connected to NASA's network, define security configuration baselines for each component and use best practices for vulnerability management on all its IT systems. Martin as well pointed out that NASA has been slow to implement full-disk encryption of data on its employees' laptops and other mobile computing devices.

NASA's security headaches are expected to increase as it turns to cloud computing to deliver software services over the web. "The need to effectively secure agency data stored in the cloud has emerged as the major challenge to federal agencies reaping the substantial benefits cloud computing offers," Martin said.