NASA suspends teen challenge results after it emerged that hackers tried to manipulate public voting on social media on racial grounds

**NASA** has confirmed that hackers tried to sway results of a challenge for teenagers that involved public voting via social media by targeting some participants on the basis of their race. [caption id=“attachment_4185337” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  NASA. Reuters.[/caption] The challenge from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center encourages students to find “spinoff” technology in their everyday world, the USA Today reported on 4 May. However, after learning hackers attempted to alter the final vote totals, NASA said on 29 April that it had to shut down the voting portion of the “OPSPARC Challenge”, which hopes to ignite creative thinking in children. “Unfortunately, it was brought to NASA’s attention … that some members of the public used social media, not to encourage students and support STEM, but to attack a particular student team based on their race and encouraged others to disrupt the contest and manipulate the vote, and the attempt to manipulate the vote occurred shortly after those posts,” NASA said in a statement.

As avid users of Twitter, we fully embrace the use of social media support for votes on our OPSPARC Challenge. We closed voting due to malicious hacking attempts to change the vote. All votes received before that point are legitimate and will be counted! https://t.co/lJXdTZaKm4

— NASA Goddard (@NASAGoddard) May 1, 2018

The Washington Post reported on 2 May that the hackers targeted a team of students from Washington, DC’s Banneker High School who created a product that could purify school systems’ water by checking for chemicals such as chlorine. The Banneker team was among eight finalists to win the challenge. Before the voting ended, members of the public were using social media to generate support for particular teams in the public voting. NASA supports this kind of community-based effort to encourage students to engage with science, technology, engineering, and math and recognises social media as an important tool for that support. The challenge team has an accurate record of the voting results prior to the attempted disruption, NASA said. “In accordance with the judging criteria and voting procedures stated on the OPSPARC website, a panel of NASA Goddard judges will make a final determination of the winners using the published rubrics,” it added. The results are slated to be announced in May.