The unique D-Wave 2X quantum computer at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing facility in Silicon Valley was showed to media on Tuesday. The machine appears to be very impressive and engineers are even planning to sue it for a new area of computing.

The machine is even used by researchers at universities. It is linked to internet like other NASA supercomputers that are made available for academics.

Engineers who displayed the machine on Tuesday appeared very keen to talk about its outstanding features, but they seemed less interested in talking about the security measures in place to stop hackers.

David Bell, director at the Universities Space Research Association, in response to a question, said, “It’s behind various security firewalls, with RSA security tokens to get in”.

Rupak Biswas, who heads exploration technology at the NASA Ames Research Center, in response to another question said that they are clearly aware of system hacks and NASA is a major target for hackers.

Biswas said he didn’t want to get into deep details about the machine apart from explaining that there are very strict processes as to how and who can get onto these systems.

The long queue of questions was shut down by a NASA moderator, who said the topic was for later discussion at another time.