On 6 September 2021, the South African National Space Agency, SANSA said, it was notified of a possible breach to the IT system. According to the agency, a file consisting of SANSA information was in the public domain.
So far, the agency said, an internal investigation was conducted, and it was determined that no network breach occurred. The file dump was from the public anonymous FTP server that is active at the SANSA Hermanus facility. The server however had personal information of previous students at SANSA.
It said.” the agency has taken the following steps to remedy the situation”, including;
- The public anonymous access of the FTP server has been completely removed; the Information regulator to be notified; and the affected parties will be notified
Finally, the agency reports that the takedown requests have been sent to sites and domains hosting the data; however, the data might appear on certain internet sites. Most of the data is information that can be accessed in the public domain as it refers to research related work in Space Science.