The BBC's flagship news show, Panorama, is running yet another 'shock! Horror! We're all gonna die' expose of evil computer hackers.

Tonight (Monday) at 2200GMT, the Beeb will reveal how the lives of space shuttle astronauts were put at risk by a hacker who zapped NASA's communications back in 1997. A British astronaut was on board at the time. [Ah! The news hook - Ed]

A NASA spokeperson said: "We had an activity at a Nasa centre where a hacker was overloading our systems... to such an extent that it interfered with communications between the NASA centre, some medical communications and the astronaut aboard the shuttle."

As the NASA shuttle orbiting the Earth docked with the Mir space station, the hacker disrupted the computer systems monitoring the medical conditions of the crew.

In the past year, NASA has suffered over 500,000 hack attacks. ®