Key facts
- The International Meteor Organization (IMO) has been hit by a cyberattack.
- The attack has taken much of the IMO's website and infrastructure offline.
- The IMO expects several weeks of partial downtime.
- The organization is prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations.
- The IMO was formally founded in 1988 and publishes the WGN journal.
The International Meteor Organization (IMO), a nonprofit dedicated to coordinating and publishing amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, announced that its infrastructure has sustained a "critical blow" from a cyberattack. The organization stated on its website that the attack has rendered much of its site offline and that it anticipates several weeks of partial downtime as it works to transition to new infrastructure and services.
In the interim, the IMO is prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, with a dedicated reporting channel available. Some information is also being shared via the organization's Facebook page. The IMO has been instrumental in establishing unified standards for reporting meteor observations and maintains databases of text, photos, and videos that are considered essential by many in the astronomical community. It also publishes the bimonthly WGN journal.
The motive behind the cyberattack remains unclear, as does the reason for targeting an organization that tracks celestial objects, particularly given that much of its data is publicly available. Attacks on organizations involved in space observation and research are relatively rare compared to other sectors, though incidents have occurred, including past attacks on NASA systems, the National Science Foundation's Noirlab, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array observatory. US agencies have previously warned that space organizations could be targets of nation-state-sponsored hackers.