Orbital ATK [OA] has responded to a March 22 lawsuit by Space Systems Loral (SSL) alleging Orbital ATK stole its proprietary data relating to the NASA Dragonfly project.

In the filing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, SSL alleged NASA notified the company last December that an employee of Orbital ATK accessed files on the NASA NX server beyond files they were authorized to view. SSL said NASA notified them that up to four documents were accessed.

The company also claimed it did not get a suitable response to a set of questions about how many employees were involved in the data breach, what they did with the information, and whether the company still possesses the information (Defense Daily, March 23).

An Orbital ATK spokesperson on March 24 said they are committed to, and adhere to, industry and government best practices in governance and ethics. Therefore, they terminated the employee for violating their Code of Ethics and Business Conduct, immediately investigated the incident in coordination with NASA, quarantined the data according to industry and government best practices in governance and ethics, and remediated the issue to their customer’s satisfaction, the spokesperson said.

“As a result we believe that SSL’s complaints against us are without merit and we intend to defend against them vigorously,” the spokesperson said.