14 DAY TRIAL // Romanian hacker Robert Butyka, also known as Iceman, was apprehended by local law enforcement after being suspected of illegally accessing NASA servers by breaking the security measures set in place by the agency.
DIICOT, Romania's organized crime and anti-terrorism division, arrested 26-year-old Butyca in Cluj Napoca, his hometown, for 24 hours.
He is accused of accessing a network without authorization, disrupting a computing system by inserting, modifying and altering data, and illegally possessing the piece of software he had utilized to break into the systems owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in December 12, 2010.
In the home of the one known in the online underground as Iceman, authorities found numerous computing devices which they took in for forensic analysis.
Local news reports that the suspect is unemployed and has no studies in the field of IT, his Facebook profile actually mentioning that he graduated from the 'University of Weed'. Since he couldn't have gained much from his attempt, the most plausible reason for the operation seems to be that he did it just to show he can.
The same sources claim that the hacker will most likely have to pay for the damages his little stunt has caused. The direct damages were estimated somewhere around $300,000 (210,000 EUR) and a total of $200,000 (140,000 EUR) were spent to fix the issues caused by the attack.
This is not the first time a Romanian hacker breaks into the systems of NASA. In 2007, 26-year-old Victor Faur was charged with breaking into the agency's servers and even disrupting communications with a spacecraft.
At the time he was also charged with attacking the computers of the US Navy and the department of energy, the damages caused only to NASA computers being as high as $1.5 million (1.1 million EUR).