'But it became apparent that he would be unable to resolve them at this time,' NASA wrote, and that's why he closed the case, and suggested NASA to do the same. The Health and Human Services (HSS) suffered 20 to 25 'incidents agency-wide as a result of CryptoLocker.' The person at the HHS revealed in the meeting that 'as a result of CryptoLocker,' his agency suffered '20-25 incidents.' In the first case, the victim was likely Srba Jovic, a research scientist who works at the Ames Research center, according to his Linkedin profile.Īlthough the name of the victim is redacted, the document revealed the location of the file that spawned the Cryptolocker infection, showing that it was found within a user folder named 'sjovic.' (Jovic did not answer to Motherboard's request for comment.) NASA did not answer Motherboard's request for comment before publication. In any case, as the source noted, NASA has never agreed to pay the ransom when infected by this kind of malware. Yet, as the document said, the infection at the Ames Research Center did cause a 'loss of access to data,' although the extent of the loss is unclear, and it's possible that NASA might have been able to recover some data from a backup. The CrytpoLocker infection at the Ames Research Center caused a 'loss of access to data.'

This is standard practice at NASA, where '95% of data is SBU and everything is backed up in triplicate,' the source told Motherboard.

But a source with knowledge of the incidents, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the two computers were laptops that were fully backed up. The document was prepared by the NASA Office of Inspector General, and is scant on details. It also hit another computer at the visitor center of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida two days later. The ransomware virus infected a computer at the NASA Ames Research Center in California on October 23, 2013, 'resulting in the loss of access to NASA data,' according to the document.

Crypto locker virus cost